Prof. Dr. Angelika Lehner: “My 14-year history with Cronobacter: a time journey through modern molecular food microbiology”

Monday, March 19, 2018, 12.00, Hygiene Institute, Lecture Hall 2, Kinderspitalgasse 15, Vienna IX

COLLOQUIUM IN PATHOPHYSIOLOGY, INFECTIOLOGY AND IMMUNOLOGY

» Invitation

Prof. Dr. rer nat. Angelika Lehner is working at the Institute for Food Safety and Hygiene, University of Zurich, Switzerland as an assistant professor in molecular food microbiology. She completed a PhD in molecular biology in 1995 at the University of Vienna, Austria. From 1995 to 2000 she was working at the Institute for Milkhygiene at the Veterinary University of Vienna (Prof. Dr. Ernst Brandl) where she focussed on pathotyping and genotyping of foodborne pathogens. In 2000 she switched topic by joining the Microbial Ecology group around Prof. Dr. Michael Wagner as a postdoc at the Chair of Microbiology, Technical University Munich, Germany. From 2003 to 2004 she held a position in the research and development department in a company developing commercial molecular based test kits for the identification of (pathogenic) bacteria (vermicon, Munich, Germany). In 2004 she was invited to Switzerland to join the team around Prof. Dr. Roger Stephan at the Institute for Food Microbiology and Hygiene where she started her research on Cronobacter (former Enterobacter sakazakii). During the last 14 years she was addressing various scientific topics such as taxonomy, stress response and pathogenesis issues, thereby significantly expanding the knowledge on this foodborne bacterial pathogen, which is associated with severe infections in preterm infants and neonates. More recently she started to implement the zebrafish embryo model, which is used in her group as an alternative in vivo model to study the pathobiology of bacterial pathogens.

Publications:

94 (peer-reviewed) publications, 2 book contributions, 2 patents

Host: Michael Duchêne