Maike Sander is Scientific Director and Chair of the Board of the Berlin Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association (MDC) since 2022. Previously, she was Director of the Pediatric Diabetes Research Center and Co-Director of the Center on Diabetes at the Institute of Engineering in Medicine at the University of California at San Diego, where she also held a professorship in Pediatrics and Molecular & Cellular Medicine.
After graduating with a medical degree from the University of Heidelberg Medical School in Germany, she conducted research at the University of California, San Francisco. Before moving to UC San Diego in 2008, she held faculty positions at Hamburg Medical School, Germany and the University of California, Irvine. Her primary research interest is to understand the molecular mechanisms that underlie the formation and function of the diverse cell types of the pancreas, in particular the insulin-producing beta cells. A recent major focus has been to establish a human pluripotent stem cell-based pancreatic beta cell differentiation platform to model mechanisms that underlie the pathogenesis of diabetes.
Her research is supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF), the Larry L. Hillblom Foundation, the Helmsley Charitable Trust, and the Iacocca Family Foundation. Maike Sander is an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation, a member of the NIH-Human Islet Research Network and T2DGENES Consortium, and the recipient of the Grodsky Award from the JDRF and the Humboldt Research Foundation Award. From 2019 to 2022, she was an Einstein Visiting Fellow at the Berlin Institute of Health.
Source: Sander Laboratory
