Meet the head of the Institute

Gisa Gerold studied biochemistry at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, where she received her biochemistry diploma (minor in physical chemistry and microbiology) in 2003. In 2008, she received her Ph.D. in biology and biochemistry from Humboldt University Berlin, conducting her research at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology under the supervision of Professor Arturo Zychlinsky. Her doctoral thesis focused on the innate immune response to bacteria. This work was awarded the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society.

During her three years of postdoctoral research at the “Center of Hepatitis C” at the Rockefeller University, New York, USA under the direction of Professor Charles M. Rice, she worked on various aspects of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection, including host tropism and HCV-related viruses in animals. From 2012 to 2017, she worked at Twincore, a joint facility of Hannover Medical School and the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research. There, she investigated mechanisms of HCV entry into hepatocytes using a combination of mass spectrometric proteomic analysis and virological methods. For her postdoctoral work, she solicited independent grants from the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Human Frontiers Science Program (HFSP), and the German Research Foundation (DFG). In 2017, the work was awarded the Robert Koch Prize for Postdoctoral Researchers in Virology.

From 2017 to 2020, she led the Viral Proteomics research group at Twincore’s Institute of Experimental Virology and has held a visiting professorship at Umeå University in Sweden since 2018. The work at the Swedish Wallenberg Center for Molecular Medicine (WCMM) is funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation and the Kempe Foundation. Her German-Swedish team is studying the entry of human pathogenic viruses such as HCV, noroviruses and chikungunya virus into the host cell as well as the innate immunity of the host cell to viral infection. Using novel technologies including label-free protein quantification, her team aims to elucidate fundamental principles of virus entry and virus recognition.

Since 2019, Gisa Gerold has been a board member of the Center for Infection Biology (ZIB) and since 2020 an associate member of the RESIST Cluster of Excellence at Hannover Medical School. From 2017 to 2018, Gisa Gerold co-chaired the annual “Cell Biology of Viral Infections” workshop of the German Society of Virology (GfV) with Dr. Pierre-Yves Lozach (University of Lyon), where she was elected as a member of the advisory board in 2020 and to the board of directors in 2023. In 2021, she established the new GfV working group “One Health and Zoonotic Viruses”, which she co-chairs with Dr. Yvonne Börgeling from the University of Münster.

In 2020, Gisa Gerold was appointed Professor of Biochemistry – Focus Molecular and Clinical Infectiology – at the Foundation of the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover. There, as a member of the Institute of Biochemistry at the “Research Center for Emerging Infections and Zoonoses” (RIZ), her team conducted research on viruses that are transmitted from animals to humans and cause diseases in humans and animals. The focus was on mosquito-borne viruses of the alphavirus genus, on arenaviruses causing hemorrhagic fever, and on gastrointestinal viruses such as noroviruses.

A biochemist and virologist, she has been director of the Institute of Biochemistry since 2022. In 2023, she was appointed deputy spokesperson of the VIPER Research Training Group.

Since November 2024, Gisa Gerold is the Director of the Institute of Virology at the Medical University of Innsbruck. Her team investigates virus – host interactions of human pathogenic viruses including emerging viruses that are transmitted from animals to humans, but also covering viruses circulating in the human population. Methodologically, Gisa Gerold’s team uses state-of-the-art proteomics approaches to discover new host factors of potentially epidemic-causing viruses. Thereby, her team strives to uncover risk factors of zoonotic transmission to humans and to understand how viruses trigger disease in specific
human tissues.