Christian Drosten has a clinical virology background. He started working on virus detection when PCR-based blood donor screening was developed in the 1990s by his supervisor Kurt Roth at University of Frankfurt. After his thesis he moved on to work on emerging viruses at the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg. Having discovered the SARS agent in 2003, he started working on coronaviruses more specifically, with a focus on their cross-host adaptive processes. In recent years he has done a lot of work on principal epidemiological aspects of MERS in humans and camels. Description of viral diversity, mainly of RNA viruses in mammalian and insect hosts, has been another interest ever since. Several projects in Africa have resulted from this work.
Over the past three years he moved most of his team from the university of Bonn to Charité. Several former group members have become independent during the process, and he has given high priority to assisting them in establishing their own groups.
He still co-supervises a few PhD projects that started during the transition time.
He has co-developed Charité Global Health for which he is acting as the scientific director.
