Prof. Birgit Sawitzki is the scientific director of the Research Center of Immunosciences and a group leader at the Institute of Medical Immunology / Charité University Hospital in Berlin. She has studied biochemistry at the Humboldt-University in Berlin and did a PhD at the Institute of Medical Immunology under the supervision of Prof. Hans-Dieter Volk. Thereafter she completed a postdoc at the Nuffield Department of Surgery, University of Oxford. She is Council member of the European Society of Organ Transplantation (ESOT). Her group has developed standardised immune monitoring tools and bioinformatics application for analysing the immunological profile of transplant patients. She is coordinating the immune monitoring of three big multi-centre investigator-driven clinical trials, sponsored by the EC, aiming on personalized treatment and eventually tolerance induction in transplant patients. Applying new tools of single cell RNA Seq profiling her group is also deciphering mechanisms underlying tolerance induction or driving unwanted inflammatory responses in preclinical mouse models and in patients.