12.06.2025 | Guest Lecture: Prof. Dr. Isabella Eckerle, PhD

Prof. Dr. Isabella Eckerle from the department of Experimental Medicine, Group Emerging Viruses at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, will hold a guest lecture at the IVI on the topic of “Emerging viruses – where public health, diagnostics and translational research meet”.

The lecture will take place on Thursday, 12th of June at 3pm in the lecture hall Pharmacology, Peter-Mayr-Straße 1, Innsbruck.

We are delighted to have her as a guest and cordially invite anyone interested to join the lecture and subsequent discussion.

Short Bio

Isabella Eckerle is a medical doctor and clinical virologists with a board certificate in microbiology, virology and infectious disease epidemiology. She is a full professor and director of the Geneva Centre for Emerging Viral Disease, a joint institution of the HUG and Unige, and independent research group leader of the group “emerging viruses” affiliated with the Department Medicine and the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Medicine at the Medical Faculty of the University of Geneva.

She studied medicine at the University of Heidelberg from 2001-2008 and has conducted her medical thesis at the German Cancer Research Centre (DKFZ).  As a junior doctor, she has worked in tropical medicine and internal medicine at the University Hospital in Heidelberg, before joining the laboratory of Christian Drosten in 2011 at the Institute of Virology, University Medical Centre of Bonn. Her research interests are zoonotic viruses with a focus on coronaviruses and other emerging viruses. In 2017, she received her Venia legendi (“Habilitation”) at the Medical Faculty of the University Bonn for her work: “Epidemiology and risk assessment of tropical and zoonotic viruses”. In 2017, she also obtained the diploma in Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (DTMH) at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in the UK.

Her research work focusses on in vitro studies on MERS-CoV, HCoV-229E, SARS-CoV-2 and other respiratory viruses as well as the development of novel and innovative cell culture models to better understand emerging viruses in a human and reservoir host-specific context. Furthermore, she is working on the development and validation of novel diagnostics for emerging viruses such as Mpox and avian influenza H5N1.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the laboratory has become a WHO reference laboratory for Covid-19 testing and she was involved in multiple high-level activities as one of the few experts having worked on coronaviruses before the emergence of SARS-CoV-2. Her research group has contributed early knowledge on viral shedding, phenotypic assessment of virus variants such as immune escape properties, performance of molecular and rapid diagnostic tests and has collaborated with a large number of colleagues in Switzerland and internationally.

In 2023, the Centre was recognized as a WHO Collaborating Centre for Epidemic and Pandemic Diseases as well as nominated in 2024 as a member of the newly founded expert laboratory network “CoViNet” of WHO. Isabella Eckerle is also on the expert panel on pandemic respiratory diseases at the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) in Germany. She is author of a lay book (in German) on zoonotic viruses and why bats play a major role as reservoir (“Von Viren, Fledermäusen und Menschen – eine folgenreiche Beziehungsgeschichte”, published in 2023, Droemer).