Jan Böttcher new iFIT member!

We warmly welcomeProfessor Dr. Jan Böttcher to his “W3 Professorship for Experimental Immunology”, which he took up on April 15, 2025 at the Medical Faculty of the University of Tübingen.

Jan Böttcher (born 1984) studied Molecular Biomedicine at the University of Bonn and completed his doctorate in 2013. From 2014 to 2018, he worked as a postdoc at the Francis Crick Institute and the CRUK London Research Institute in the United Kingdom. After a four-year stay in London, he returned to Germany in 2018 and started as a junior research group leader at the Technical University of Munich. In addition to his research activities, he was responsible for setting up his own microscopy facility with numerous high-resolution microscopes using third-party funds. In Tübingen, as Professor of Experimental Immunology, he will be part of the newly created Institute of Immunology, the M3 Research Center and a member of the “iFIT” oncology cluster of excellence.    

Jan Böttcher's research focuses on the interplay between cancer cells and immune cells in tumors and the tumor microenvironment. He is particularly interested in the pathways that tumor cells use to inhibit the access of innate and adaptive immune cells to tumor tissue, in cell-cell interactions within the tumor microenvironment and in the effector functions of tumor-infiltrating immune cells. Another focus is to understand the spatial organization and dynamics of immune responses in chronic microbial infections in barrier tissues such as lung and liver. To address these questions, Jan Böttcher's research group combines transplantable and autochthonous mouse models of cancer with advanced immunological methods, high-resolution 3D imaging of tumors and tissues, and bioinformatic analyses of data from cancer patients.

Jan Böttcher has been honored with several prizes for his scientific achievements, including the Fleur Hiege Memorial Prize (2024), the Fritz and Ursula Melchers Prize (2018) and the Georges Köhler Prize of the German Society for Immunology (2024).

In addition to his scientific work, Jan Böttcher is an enthusiastic triathlete and enjoys exploring the mountains by road bike or on foot.