(Vienna, 03 December 2025) Thomas Vogl, head of a research group at the Center for Cancer Research at the Medical University of Vienna, has been selected by the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) for its Young Investigator Programme. His group is investigating how the gut microbiome and the immune system interact to influence the success of cancer therapy – in particular, which microbial and tumour factors determine whether the immune system recognises or evades tumour cells.
The Young Investigator Programme is aimed at life, bio and natural scientists who have recently established their own research group in Europe. It focuses on career, networking and training support in the early years of the research group. The programme offers young scientists an important bridge between the postdoctoral phase and long-term establishment as an independent group. Selection is based on a competitive selection process.
Thomas Vogl and his multidisciplinary team from the fields of molecular biology, immunology and bioinformatics are investigating which microbial and tumour factors are crucial for successful cancer therapies. His expertise lies in combining biological experiments with computer-assisted analyses. In this context, the immune system is analysed in the laboratory using blood samples from patients together with novel high-throughput methods and automated liquid handling robots.
About
Thomas Vogl received his doctorate in molecular biomedical sciences and biotechnology from Graz University of Technology. After initially working mainly on molecular biology experiments, he focused on bioinformatics and artificial intelligence as a postdoc in Australia and Israel. In his work at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Vogl used robotic pipelines for liquid handling to generate large data sets on the interaction between the human immune system and the microbiome. In August 2022, he became a group leader at the Medical University of Vienna and recently took up a tenure-track assistant professorship. Thomas Vogl has published several papers on the interaction between the microbiome and the immune system and is coordinator of the EU Horizon Health consortium ID-DarkMatter-NCD. In November 2023, Thomas Vogl took up a §99-(5) assistant professorship for "Microbiome in Cancer Immunology" as part of the tenure track model at the Medical University of Vienna.