Jürgen Becker

Jürgen C. Becker studied at the Hannover Medical School and received his MD with a thesis on the immunoregulatory capacity of natural killer cells on the adaptive immune system. He subsequently trained in dermatology at the University of Würzburg and in tumor immunology at the Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, and the Danish Cancer Society, Copenhagen. In 2000, he received a PhD for his characterization of the effects of therapeutic interventions on the adaptive immune response against melanoma in preclinical models. He became a full professor of dermato-oncology in 2003 at the University of Würzburg, where he coordinated a DFG-funded clinical research unit (CRU) focusing on the tumor microenvironment. In 2010, he was appointed Director of General Dermatology at the Medical University of Graz, where he served as deputy coordinator of a graduate program on the molecular aspects of inflammation and coordinated a Horizon 2020 project on the immunology and immunotherapy of Merkel cell carcinoma. Since 2014, he has been a member of the German Cancer Consortium (DKTK, https://dktk.dkfz.de/forschung/dktk-wissenschaftler/jurgen-becker) as chair of the Department of Translational Skin Cancer Research (TSCR) at the University Medicine Essen (www.unidue.de/zmb/members/becker/). His research interests focus on the reciprocal effects of tumor and host cells, and more recently external factors such as bacteria (e.g. Staphylococcus aureus in cutaneous lymphoma and squamous cell carcinoma) and viruses (e.g. MCPyV and HERV-K) as well as the identification of prognostic and predictive biomarkers for Immunomodulatory therapies.