Steffen Rupp, born in 1962, studied chemistry at the Universities of Stuttgart, Freiburg and Cincinnati. He received a doctorate with distinction in 1994 from the Institute for Biochemistry at the University of Stuttgart. From 1995 to 1998, he worked on differentiation processes in yeasts as part of his DFG research fellowship at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, MIT, Cambridge, MA. Since 1999 Steffen Rupp has been at Fraunhofer IGB. From 1999 to 2005 he was head of the junior research group “Automated Protein Screening Systems” which, in 2006, became the independent department Molecular Biotechnology with a staff of up to 50. The department’s main focus has spanned from infection biology, molecular cell technologies and functional genome analysis to industrial biotechnology. In 2015 Steffen Rupp was appointed an adjunct Professor of Molecular Biotechnology and later in the year Deputy Director of the Institute. Since 2018, he has been Co-Director of the Fraunhofer “Project Center for Drug Discovery and Delivery at Hebrew University”, Jerusalem, focusing on the development of anti-infectives and immunomodulators as well as their formulation. Since 2019, he has been coordinator of the business area Health at Fraunhofer IGB.
Activities
In addition to his tasks as coordinator of the business area Health at Fraunhofer IGB and Co-Director of the Fraunhofer Project Center for Drug Discovery and Delivery at Hebrew University, Steffen Rupp teaches as an adjunct professor at Faculty 4 of the University of Stuttgart for the students of the Technical Biology course. He also regularly acts as a reviewer for funding institutions in Germany and other countries and is a reviewer for numerous international journals.
Awards
In 2005, Steffen Rupp was awarded the Research Promotion Prize of the German-speaking Mycological Society (DMykG) for his scientific achievements in medical mycology.
Focus
Steffen Rupp’s scientific focus is developing and analyzing in vitro host-pathogen interaction models, focusing on pathogenic fungi and their adaptation for drug identification and validation.