Election of FAU Vice Presidents

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Prof. Dr. Georg Schett, Chair of Internal Medicine III at FAU (Image: FAU/Erich Malter)

Prof. Dr. Georg Schett is successor to Prof. Dr. Günter Leugering in the Executive Board.

The FAU University Council has elected a new member to the Executive Board and confirmed three others in office. Physician Prof. Dr. Georg Schett will become Vice President Research and succeed mathematician Prof. Dr. Günter Leugering, who is retiring.

The previous board members Prof. Dr. Friedrich Paulsen, Vice President People, Prof. Dr. Bärbel Kopp, Vice President Education, and Prof. Dr. Kathrin M. Möslein, Vice President Outreach were all re-elected via postal vote. The four Vice Presidents will remain in office until 31 March 2024.

Prof. Dr. Georg Schett has held a Chair in Internal Medicine at FAU since 2006 and is also director of the Department of Medicine 3 at Universitätsklinikum Erlangen.

Schett studied medicine at the University of Innsbruck where he completed his doctoral degree in 1994. He worked as an assistant at the Research Institute for Biomedical Aging Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences until 1996. Afterwards he completed his speciality training for internal medicine at the University of Vienna in 2001, before becoming a specialist physician and then a senior physician in 2004. He completed his habilitation in internal medicine in Vienna in 2003. In 2004, he was a visiting researcher at Amgen in Thousand Oaks, California, USA and qualified as a specialist in rheumatology in the same year.

Professor Schett has won a large number of prizes and awards, most recently the Dr. Franciscus Blondel Medal of the city of Aachen for outstanding contributions to the field of rheumatology. He has collaborated on eight large third-party projects. He is speaker of the Collaborative Research Centre 1181 (Checkpoints for Resolution of Inflammation) as well as principal investigator of the ERC Synergy Grant (4D+ NanoSCOPE) started in 2018 and the BMBF funding project ‘MASCARA’ (Molecular Assessment of Signatures Characterizing the Remission of Arthritis), which began in 2020.

Prof. Schett’s scientific expertise is in demand all over the world. He was a visiting professor at the University of California San Diego in 2009, at the University of Xian and the University of Guangzhou, China in 2012, at the Hospital of Special Surgery in New York in 2014, and at New York University in 2018.

He is a member of the DFG review board, a reviewer for several academic societies and journals and has collaborated on organising a large number of international congresses.

Since his appointment at FAU, he has maintained close links with an ever growing number of national and international collaborations on joint projects with institutions such as the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology (Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie, VIB) in Ghent, Belgium, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden and the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology in Oxford, UK.

Schett’s predecessor, Prof. Dr. Günter Leugering is retiring on 1 April and was therefore not able to stand for election. He will remain at FAU as a Senior Fellow as well as an Officer of the President for the Long Night of Sciences. Leugering was elected Vice President in 2015, initially for International Affairs, before becoming Vice President Research in 2018.

Information about the other members of the Executive Board is available on our website.

Further information

FAU Press Office
Phone +49 9131 8570229
presse@fau.de