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 Cursiefen specializes in diseases of the cornea and transplant surgery on the eye. Since 2015, he has headed a DFG research group at the Eye Clinic of the University of Cologne. Since 2024, he has been the spokesperson for the SFB 1607 on age-related blind eye diseases. He is on the board of the Center for Molecular Medicine in Cologne (CMMC) and the European Vision Institute. He has led various EU research projects, was a review board member of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and has been Secretary General of the German Ophthalmological Society (DOG), the scientific society for ophthalmology, since 2020. Prof. Cursiefen is 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.