After graduation from medical school in 1992, he finished his doctoral thesis at the Faculty of Medicine, Ludwig-Maximilian-University of Munich (LMU), Germany. His research career started in the field of immunology in 1994 at the Institute of Immunology at LMU. In 1996 he joined the Institute for Molecular Virology at the GSF National Research Center in Neuherberg as a young postdoc where he started his future research on the immunobiology of poxvirus infections using vaccinia virus (VACV). At that time, he was the first to demonstrate that the highly attenuated VACV strain MVA was useful as a recombinant viral vector expressing tumor antigens for immunotherapy of cancer. In 1999, he continued working as a postdoctoral researcher and resident at the Institute of Virology at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and was appointed Head of the Research Group Viral Vector Vaccines in 2004. After having received his habilitation, venia legendi and board certification as specialist in Microbiology and Virology, he continued his research in the field of viral immunology. His group was the first to show that anti-viral CD8+ T cells cross-compete for their cognate antigen thereby shaping the immunodominance hierachy of T cell specificites directed against more complex viruses such as vaccinia. In 2011, I was appointed Full Professor for Molecular Virology at the Institute for Virology at the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, and acts as the Vice Director of the institute since 2014. Next to educating students from various fields in biomedical sciences and medicine, he has supervised the work of many graduate students, PhD students and postdocs. His research has a special focus on viral immunology and vaccine development which is embedded in a network of national and international collaborations and supported by national and EU third party funding. He is a member of several scientific societies, authored and coauthored over 60 peer-reviewed publications and acts as an editor and reviewer for several peer-reviewed journals.