Professor Dr. Klaus Osterrieder
Professor Dr. Klaus Osterrieder grew up on a family-run dairy farm in Bavaria. He initially studied agricultural sciences for two semesters before studying veterinary medicine at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. He obtained his doctorate in 1993 and habilitated in virology in 1997. He then worked as a group leader at the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institute on the island of Riems until 2002 and as an Associate Professor of Virology at the College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University in the USA until 2007. In 2007, he was appointed Professor of Virology at Cornell. To date, he has been associated with Cornell University through an associate professorship. At the end of 2007, he accepted an appointment at the Department of Veterinary Medicine at the Freie Universität Berlin. In Berlin, Osterrieder took over as head of the Institute of Virology in 2007 and successfully expanded it.
From 2011 to 2013, Osterrieder championed the interests of the Department of Veterinary Medicine in Berlin for two years as Vice Dean for Research and was Director of the Graduate School ZIBI - Center of Infection Biology and Immunity in Berlin for six years from 2014 to 2020. In 2020, he moved to Hong Kong for two and a half years and headed the Jockey Club of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences of the City University of Hong Kong as Dean. Despite the adverse circumstances during the pandemic and the National Security Law in Hong Kong, he established an accredited veterinary education program during this time, among other things.
