About
Michael Heneka (MH) studied medicine in Tübingen, Lausanne and London from 1990-1996. He obtained his medical degree at the Institute of Pharmacology for which he received the 1998 Attempto Award of the University of Tübingen. He started his clinical residency in Neurology at the Dept. of Neurology of the Univ. of Tübingen in 1996 and joined the Dept. of Neurology at the University of Bonn in 1999. After his clinical board examination (2002) and habilitation (2003) he took the chair as professor for Molecular Neurology at the University of Münster in 2004. In 2008 he was appointed professor for Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Bonn heading the DFG Clinical Research Unit 177.
MH has a >25 years of track record in studying neurodegenerative disease at the experimental, preclinical and clinical level. While the main focus of his work is related to dementia and AD, he has also been working on Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and PD. At the clinical level he has established a neurodegenerative outpatient unit at the University of Münster and thereafter at the University of Bonn from 2008-2016. The latter has been the basis for the foundation of the Dept. of Neurodegenerative Disease and Geriatric Psychiatry in 2016, which he was heading until his move to the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) in January 2022.
MH’s preclinical work and establishment of in vitro and in vivo models of neurodegenerative disease at the University of Bonn has been the part of the University’s application for the newly founded German Center for Neurodegenerative Disease (DZNE), where he was leading the Neuroinflammation Research Group since its establishment in 2010 until 2022. He has served as board member of the network of competence of the German Federal Ministry for Education and Science (BMBF) “Degenerative Dementia“, as an executive board member of the task force “Dementia“ of the European Federation of Neurological Societies (EFNS) and as an expert panel member of the German national expert group for medical guidelines („S3 guideline for dementia”). Besides this, he has been the head of the Clinical Research Group 177 (2008-2015) entitled “Innate Immunity in Chronic Neurodegeneration” and a Steering Committee Member of the Cluster of Excellence “Immunosensation”, both funded by the German Research Council (DFG). Next to his role as an Associate Editor of Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy and editorial board member of various neuroscience journals, MH serves as scientific advisory board member of the Paris Brain Institute and the Dementia Research Institute UK.
He is the organizer of the biannual meeting “Venusberg Meeting on Neuroinflammation” since 2009 as well as co-organizer of various international meetings and symposia including the Keystone Meeting on Myloid cells in 2022. He has been organizing various neuroscience summer schools at the international level focusing on early career support for graduate students. The publication record of MH includes corner authorships in internationally recognized journals including Nature, Cell, Nature Immunology and Lancet Neurology. Some of his career and findings have been covered by Allison Abbot in “The Brain Inflammed” (Nature Vol. 556 p426-428). To date he has published more than 300 peer-reviewed manuscripts and has been identified as highly-cited researcher by Clarivate since 2018. Next to contributions to various public outreach events (Cluster Science Days, DFG program on Demographic Change a.o.), MH has tutored over 20 medical thesis students and over 10 PhD students. MH has been awarded with the Christa Lorenz Award for ALS Research in 2011 and received the Hans und Ilse Breuer Award for Alzheimer Research in 2013.