Professor Birgit Sawitzki has accepted a lifetime W3 Professorship in Translational Immunology at the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité (BIH). The trained biochemist investigates how immune cells interact in severe inflammatory responses. These occur in severe courses of COVID-19, in autoimmune diseases, and in organ transplantation rejection, thus posing major challenges for medicine today. Strong immunosuppressive drugs can intervene in the inflammatory processes, but they do not offer a cure and often have severe side effects.