Vice-Rector for Research

Professor Dr. Claus Cursiefen

Claus Cursiefen studied medicine in Regensburg, Würzburg, Dundee, Malta and London. From 1995 to 2001, he was a research assistant at the Eye Clinic of Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and received his doctorate in 1997 from the Institute of Anatomy at Julius-Maximilians-Universität of Würzburg. He became Professor of Cornea and Anterior Eye Segments (W2) at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg in 2011. In the same year, he was appointed to a full professorship (W3) in Ophthalmology at the University of Cologne’s Faculty of Medicine, also serving as Director of the Department of Ophthalmology at University Hospital Cologne.

Professor Dr. Cursiefen specializes in afflictions of the cornea and eye transplant surgery. He has served as head of the DFG research group in this field at the University’s Eye Clinic since 2015. He is on the boards of the Center for Molecular Medicine Cologne (CMMC) and the European Vision Institute, as well as a senator of the Faculty of Medicine. He has led various EU research projects and is a review board member of the German Research Foundation (DFG), Secretary General of the German Ophthalmological Society (DOG), and a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

Claus Cursiefen’s research focuses on the significance of blood and lymphatic vessels in ocular transplant immunology. As a postdoc, he became immersed in the topic during a research stay at Harvard’s Schepens Eye Research Institute.