Sina Bartfeld PhD

Sina Bartfeld studied biology at the University of Hamburg, the University of Melbourne, and the Freie University of Berlin. In her Ph.D. thesis, in the group of Prof. Thomas F. Meyer at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, she identified ALPK1 as a central signaling molecule in the innate immune response to Helicobacter pylori. Dr. Bartfeld then joined the group of Prof. Hans Clevers at the Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht for her postdoc with support from an EMBO short-term fellowship and a Marie Curie postdoc fellowship. 

Sina contributed to the understanding of stem cells in the stomach and established methods to grow human gastric organoids from normal tissue as well as cancer tissue. Further, Dr. Bartfeld pioneered the use of organoids for infection biology and showed that the inflammatory response of epithelial cells to H. pylori depends on the differentiation of the epithelial cells. Since October 2015, Dr. Bartfeld has led an independent Young Investigator group at the Center for Infection Research (ZINF) at the University of Wurzburg.