Roland Nau

Dr. Roland Nau studied Medicine, Sociology, and Philosophy at Georg-August University in Göttingen. For his doctoral thesis, He spent two years at Ulrich Kuhnt's lab at the Department of Neurobiology, Max-Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Gottingen.

During his clinical training, He worked for several years in the Intensive Care Ward of the Department of Neurology at Georg-August University, Gottingen. For a young clinician, bacterial meningitis is a fascinating disease. Doing the right things quickly is very important for a good outcome. Nevertheless, some patients die or stay severely impaired, although you did everything right and as quickly as possible.

In the first years, his clinical supervisor Hilmar Prange and he, together with several co-workers, studied the entry of antibiotics and chemotherapeutics into the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) in patients, aiming at improving the treatment of nosocomial central nervous system (CNS) infections and of brain edema.

When he had passed his exam as a neurologist, He felt that he should go into more basic clinical science. For this reason, He joined Martin Täuber's group at the Division of Infectious Diseases, University of California, San Francisco. There he spent a very productive fellowship which afterward encouraged me to launch a research group on CNS infections.