Christian Drosten studied medicine at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt. He received his doctoral degree in 2003 with a thesis on establishment of high throughput blood donor screening for HBV and HIV-1 in transfusion medicine. From June 2000, Drosten worked at Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine (BNITM) in Hamburg. His laboratory group “Molecular Diagnostics” focused on virus discovery and molecular diagnostics in tropical viral diseases. From 2007, Drosten founded and headed the Institute of Virology at University of Bonn Medical Center. In 2017, he and his team moved to Charité in Berlin, where he is currently the Director of the Institute of Virology and co-director of the Centre for Global Health (together with Professor Beate Kampmann). He was a member of the German Ministry of Health’s International Advisory Board on Global Health from 2017-2019. Drosten codiscovered the SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV), for which he also developed one of the first diagnostic tests in 2003. He contributed studies on all aspects of disease ecology and natural history of MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) and recently focuses on SARS-CoV-2 in addition. As early as January 2020 he presented the first diagnostic workflow for COVID-19 diagnostics that was initially adapted in many countries before the wider availability of commercial tests. During the ongoing pandemic, he has been consulting German federal and state authorities and was appointed to the European Commission's advisory panel on Covid-19.
