As of 1st November, Prof. Dr. Kilian Eyerich has been appointed the Medical Director of the Department of Dermatology at the Medical Center - University of Freiburg. He is succeeding Prof. Dr. Leena Bruckner-Tuderman, who had managed the department since 2003.

Eyerich studied medicine and did his doctorate at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). From 2014 to 2021, he held a renowned Heisenberg professorship from the German Research Foundation at TUM. From 2019 to 2021, he was also a professor at the Karolinska Institute, Sweden. Eyerich is particularly interested in the development and treatment of inflammatory skin diseases such as neurodermatitis or psoriasis.

“We understand the molecular causes of skin diseases better every day. This partly reveals similarities between diseases that look very different. This reorganization offers enormous potential because it allows us to specifically examine treatment approaches for diseases that are molecularly similar,” Eyerich says.

Eyerich is intensively researching how immune and tissue cells influence each other in inflammatory skin diseases and how the findings can be used for precise, molecular diagnostics and improved therapy decisions.

Eyerich holds four patents, including one for a diagnostic method with which neurodermatitis and psoriasis can be clearly differentiated on the molecular level. This allows for targeted treatment based on molecular markers. “Personalized medicine has a great deal of potential in dermatology that we want to increase over the next few years," says Eyerich. He has published more than 40 specialist publications as first or last author, and is co-editor of several specialized scientific magazines.

• Department of Dermatology