Bruce Witte Memorial Lecture

The 2023 Bruce Witte Lecture titled “Immune Responses in Hepatitis B Virus Infection and Cure” is presented by Barbara Rehermann, MD.

The Witte Lectureship was established by Hepatitis B Foundation Cofounders, Janine and Paul Witte, in remembrance of their son, Bruce, to allow for a distinguished leader in the field to visit the Hepatitis B Foundation and Blumberg Institute to make a presentation and meet with scientists and public health leaders. It is the HBF’s most important named lecture. Previous Witte Lecturers include: Harvey Alter (Nobel Prize laureate), Frank Chisari, Charles Rice (Nobel Prize laureate), John Taylor, John Gerin, Raymond Schinazi, Raymond Dwek, Rafi Ahmed, Adrian DiBisceglie, Steve Locarnini, Dennis Liotta, John Martin, Stanley Lemon and Marion Peters​​​​​​​.

Dr. Barbara Rehermann is Chief of the Immunology Section, Liver Diseases Branch, NIDDK at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, USA. She received an M.D. degree and the venia legendi for Immunology from Medizinische Hochschule, Hannover, Germany., and pursued clinical postgraduate training in the Department of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Endocrinology at the same university (headed by Professor Michael Manns), and postdoctoral research at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, USA (with Professor Francis Chisari).

Dr. Rehermann’s research focusses on the pathogenesis of viral hepatitis and the regulation of immune responses and metabolism by the microbiome. Her laboratory performs translational immunology studies with well-characterized patient cohorts and uses animal models such as laboratory mice with wild mouse microbiota to evaluate how hepatic and systemic immune responses are regulated by the gastrointestinal microbiome.

Dr. Rehermann is an elected fellow of German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the American Society for Microbiology and the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases. Her work was honored with national and international awards including the NIDDK Director and the NIH Director awards, several NIH Bench-to-Bedside awards, the Max Pettenkofer Award and the Loeffler-Frosch Award of the German Society for Virology. She has published over 150 manuscripts (h-index 63), several of which appeared in Nature Medicine, J Clin Investigation, Science, Cell and PNAS attesting to the cross-disciplinary impact of our work on many areas of Immunology including host-microbe interactions. She has trained over 60 postdoctoral fellows and students, many of whom now hold academic positions in the US, Europe and Asia.

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