Prof. Dr. Malte Spielmann

Malte Spielmann is Director of the Institute of Medical Genetics and Human Genetics at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and an External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society (MPG). He studied medicine at Witten/Herdecke University and, following a research stay at Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA, received his doctoral degree from Ruhr University Bochum in 2010. He subsequently moved to Berlin, where he first worked as a resident physician and later as a group leader at the Institute of Medical Genetics and Human Genetics at Charité. After completing his habilitation and board certification in medical genetics in 2016, he was a research fellow at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA.

From 2020 to 2025, Malte Spielmann served as director of the Institutes of Human Genetics at the University Medical Center Schleswig-Holstein (UKSH) at the Kiel and Lübeck campuses. His work has received multiple distinctions and has been funded by the German Centre for Cardiovascular Research (DZHK) and the German Research Foundation (DFG), including a Research Fellowship and support through the Heisenberg Programme. As spokesperson of the Network for Rare Diseases within the Model Project for Genome Sequencing, he advocates for the needs of individuals living with rare diseases.

His research focuses on understanding how non-coding mutations and structural variants contribute to human disease by perturbing gene regulation during development. A central aim of his work is to elucidate the pleiotropic effects of genetic variation during embryogenesis and to uncover how alterations in genome structure influence the three-dimensional (3D) organization of the genome.