Barbara Rehermann is Chief of the Immunology Section, Liver Diseases Branch, NIDDK at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland USA. The goal of her research is to better understand the immunological factors that contribute to inflammatory diseases such as viral hepatitis, to assess how immune responses and chronic inflammation are regulated by the microbiome and to devise strategies that modulate the progression of chronic liver disease and/or induce protective immune responses. Her laboratory performs translational immunology studies with biospecimens from well-characterized patient cohorts, and established preclinical mouse models with natural microbiota to evaluate how hepatic and systemic immune responses are regulated by the microbiome. Her work was honored with national and international awards including the Pettenkofer Award, the Loeffler-Frosch Award of the German Society for Virology, the NIH Bench-to-Bedside and Salzman awards and the NIH Director award.
Dr. Rehermann received an M.D. degree and the Venia Legendi for Immunology from Medizinische Hochschule, Hannover, Germany. She completed a clinical residency and fellowship in the Department of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Endocrinology at the same university, and a postdoctoral research fellowship at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA prior to joining the National Institutes of Health. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Microbiology, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases.She served as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Immunology and is currently Associate Editor for the Journal of Hepatology, Consulting Editor for The Journal of Clinical Investigation and an editorial board member for the Journal of Infectious Diseases and Journal of Virology. She has trained more than 55 postdoctoral fellows and students, many of whom now hold academic positions in the US, Germany, Italy, South Korea and Japan.