Group leader Stephan Speier appointed Professor

Group leader Stephan Speier has been appointed as Professor for the Physiology of Pancreatic Islet Cells at the Medical Faculty of the TU Dresden. The professorship is affiliated with the Institute for Physiology and is combined with the position as research group leader at the Institute for Pancreatic Islet Research / Paul Langerhans Institute Dresden of the Helmholtz Zentrum Munich at the University Hospital and Faculty of Medicine Carl Gustav Carus of TU Dresden (IPI/PLID). After studying human biology at the Philipps-University in Marburg and conducting his PhD-thesis at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Stephan Speier worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. In 2009, he joined the Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden (CRTD) and the Paul Langerhans Institute Dresden as an Emmy Noether Fellow of the DFG.

In his research, Stephan Speier studies the insulin-producing pancreatic beta-cells, whose malfunction or destruction leads to diabetes. To that aim, his research group focusses on the protection and restoration of cell function and the development of new therapeutic approaches for diabetes by increasing beta-cell mass. His particular interest centers on the investigation of human beta cells using novel experimental techniques. “The joint professorship at the Medical Faculty of the TU Dresden and the Institute for Pancreatic Islet Research / Paul Langerhans Institute Dresden gives me an internationally unique opportunity to address this topic”, Stephan Speier points out.