Prof Georg Holländer is the Director of the BRCCH and an expert in molecular developmental immunology. He holds professorships at the University of Basel, ETH Zurich and the University of Oxford, UK. Together with Vice Director Sai Reddy, Prof Holländer is the Centre’s academic leader and is responsible for its strategic orientation and initiatives.

Prof Holländer is Professor of Paediatric Immunology in the Department of Biomedicine at the University of Basel, Professor of Developmental Immunology at ETH Zurich and the Hoffmann and Action Medical Research Professor of Developmental Medicine and Head of the Department of Paediatrics at the University of Oxford, UK. He trained in both paediatrics and experimental immunology in Switzerland and the USA and completed his medical studies at the University of Basel. He then did his postdoctoral work and held a position at Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA, before rejoining the University of Basel as a faculty member and then subsequently the University of Oxford. His research interest is the development and function of the immune system in health and disease. His particular scientific focus concerns the immunobiology of the thymus, which is the body’s primary lymphoid organ for the development and selection of T lymphocytes, a type of cell critical to the functioning of the adaptive immune system response. In order to study the physiology of thymus development and to further characterize the pathologies that evolve as a consequence of damage to the thymus, Prof Holländer’s research laboratory has developed mouse models for studying thymus development and function.