Jörg Vogel

Jörg Vogel is a Professor and Director at the University of Würzburg. In 2017, he also founded the Helmholtz-Institute for RNA-based Infection Research, where he has served as Director since. His lab strives to understand the role of RNA in bacterial pathogens, the human microbiome and phages. He has developed new single-cell RNA-seq techniques to chart the RNA landscape of important microbes and to understand how microbes use RNA as a regulator of their genes. He asks mechanistic RNA biology questions but also works towards RNA-centric manipulations of microbes with programmable RNA antibiotics, also referred to as ‘asobiotics’.

Vogel has published over 250 papers and received several prizes, including Germany’s highest science prize, the DFG Leibniz Award (2017). He is an elected fellow of EMBO, the Bavarian and the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina), the European (EAM) and American (AAM) Academies of Microbiology, including a term as EAM President in 2020-2024.