Prof Lothar H. Wieler

Prof Lothar H. Wieler is chair of Digital Global Public Health and speaker of the Digital Health Cluster, Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI), one of Germany’s top computer science schools in Germany.

Formerly, he served as the president of the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, the national Public Health Institute in Germany. His research focussed on zoonotic diseases in a One health concept, i.e. infections that are passed between animals and humans, and account for many of the newly (re-)emerging infectious diseases. He also focusses on the pandemic caused by antibiotic resistant bacteria, a leading global cause of mortality by infectious agents. 

Wieler published more than 250 scientific publications and was awarded several scientific prices. He is co-founder of the German national research platform on zoonoses, and deputy spokesperson for the research consortium InfectControl 2020, which pursues intersectoral approaches to preventing and treating infections from a One Health perspective.

Prof Wieler is also a member of the Strategic and Technical Advisory Group for Infectious Hazards (STAG-IH) of the World Health Organisation, and since 2010, he is also an elected member of the German National Academy of Sciences, where he also holds the position of a senator of the section of Global Health. In 2020 he was nominated to the member board of the One Health Global Leaders Group on Antimicrobial Resistance, launched by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) and the World Health Organization (WHO). In 2021 Wieler has been awarded two honorary Doctors of Veterinary Medicine (Dr. med. vet. h.c. mult.), one by the Vetsuisse Faculty of the University of Zurich and one by the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover, in 2022 by the Veterinary Faculty of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. He was also named an AVES Honorary Diplomate by the American Veterinary Epidemiology Society in 2021. As an honorary professor with teaching responsibility, he continues to be associated with the Institute of Microbiology and Epizootics at the Department of Veterinary Medicine at Freie Universität Berlin.