Occupation Immunologist Name Klaus Rajewsky | Awards Robert Koch Prize | |
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Born November 12, 1936 Frankfurt am Main | ||
Klaus Rajewsky (born 12 November 1936 in Frankfurt) is a German immunologist, renowned for his work on B cells.
He studied medicine in Frankfurt, Munich and at the Pasteur Institute, Paris. In 1964 he started working at the Institute of Genetics in the University of Cologne, where he became professor for genetics. He researched Hodgkin's disease and the role of B cells within the immune system. He also developed conditional knockout mice based on Cre-Lox recombination.
He is one of the founding fathers of the German society for immunology (1967). Since 1994 he has been a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. From 1995 to 2001 he was head of the Monterontondo station of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory near Rome. In 1996 he was awarded the Robert Koch Prize (shared with Fritz Melchers). In 1998 he founded Artemis Pharmaceuticals, together with Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and Peter Stadler.
In 2001 he started working at the Center for Blood Research at Harvard Medical School, Boston, where an additional focus of his work concerns RNAi, especially microRNAs, in conjunction with immune development and control. Since start of 2012 he works at MDC Berlin.
Klaus Rajewsky is a son of the noted biophysicist Boris Rajewsky.