Dirk Schadendorf MD

Dirk Schadendorf is the Director of the Department of Dermatology (since 2008) and the West German Cancer Center (WTZ) (since 2013) at the University Hospital Essen. He attended Medical School at the University Hospital, Hamburg, and has been licensed to practice medicine since 1986. Subsequently, Prof Schadendorf went to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the USA for 2 years where he obtained post-doctoral training in Tumour Immunology by Dr. Lloyd Old starting his experimental work on melanoma.

After a short period at the Max-Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, he started his residency in dermatology. During his 6 years at the Department of Dermatology at University Hospital Rudolf Virchow in Berlin, he received his residency training and board certification in Dermatology and Venerology (1994) to become Assistant Professor for Dermatology in 1995. After receiving the prestigious DFG- Heisenberg Scholarship, he was appointed as Head of the Skin Cancer Unit at the German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, and as Associate Professor for Dermato-Oncology at Mannheim University Hospital, Medical Faculty of the University of Heidelberg in 1997.

Professor Schadendorf has been President of the German Dermatologic Cooperative Oncology Group (DeCOG) between 2010 and 2018. He has been serving on the steering committee of the well-known EORTC Melanoma Group for more than 2 decades in several roles. He is currently involved in more than 30 clinical studies. He has a strong focus on translational research with a special interest in tumor immunology, therapy resistance, tumor heterogeneity, and plasticity and target therapy. Prof Schadendorf has published more than 700 peer-reviewed papers ( see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Schadendorf-D) with many aspects of clinical and translational research of skin cancers in journals like New England Journal of Medicine, Science, Nature, Nature Medicine, Cell, JAMA, JAMA Oncology, Cancer Discovery, J Experimental Medicine, Lancet, Lancet Oncology or Journal of Clinical Oncology