Claudia Giesecke-Thiel receives an ERC Starting Grant 2025
Funding will support her work on human B cell immunology.
The recent coronavirus pandemic has made it clear that long-term immune protection is not organized in the same way throughout the body. While antibody levels in the blood remain relatively stable after infection or vaccination, thus providing reliable protection against severe disease, the antibodies on the mucous membranes of the upper respiratory tract disappear quickly. This makes symptomatic infection with the virus possible again. In her “TopBMemory” project, Claudia Giesecke-Thiel aims to shed light on the underlying immunological mechanisms: "We want to understand how the site of initial contact with the pathogen shapes the immune response and immune memory and how this ‘first impression’ changes when the body later comes into contact with the same pathogen via a different route”, she explains. To this end, the immunologist and her team will examine pathogen-specific B cells in detail and test their function in tonsil organoids. For the project, she is moving from the MPIMG to the Department of Infectious Diseases and Intensive Care Medicine at Charité. “In the long term, we want to understand how classic systemic vaccination can build up protection on the mucous membranes,” says Claudia Giesecke-Thiel.
Claudia Giesecke-Thiel received her doctorate in 2015 from the Humboldt University in Berlin and Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. In 2016, she was awarded an independent postdoctoral fellowship from the Berlin School of Regenerative Therapies (BSRT) joining Prof. Andreas Radbruch’s lab at the German Rheumatism Research Center (DRFZ) to investigate how transient anti-drug antibody responses transition into chronic responses under new antibody therapies and which markers indicate this transition at an early stage. In 2018, Claudia Giesecke-Thiel moved to the MPIMG, where, in addition to establishing and managing the flow cytometry service group, she worked on key studies on the role of cross-reactive T cells in the immune defense against SARS-CoV-2 together with the group of Prof. Dr. Andreas Thiel at the Charité and Berlin Institute of Health (BIH). In January 2026, she will launch her own research group at the Department of Infectious Diseases and Critical Care Medicine at the Charité Berlin.
The ERC Starting Grant supports research projects by promising young scientists at the beginning of their independent careers who completed their doctorates 2-7 years ago. The grant of up to €1.5 million is awarded for a period of up to five years.
