Čičin-Šain Luka, F.C.A.

Corresponding members IV. Department of Medical Sciences
Čičin-Šain Luka

Date of birth:

  • 1972

Place of birth:

  • Rijeka

Čičin-Šain Luka, F.C.A.

Corresponding members IV. Department of Medical Sciences

Membership in Academy:

  • corresponding member – Department of Medical Sciences (5/21/2026 – …)

Curriculum Vitae

Luka Čičin-Šain (born 1972, Rijeka, Croatia) is a Croatian physician-scientist who has built one of Europe’s leading research programmes in viral immunology over the past two decades. After earning his MD at the University of Rijeka in 1996 and passing Croatian state medical licensing examinations, he pursued graduate training in biomedicine, obtaining an MS in 2004 and a PhD in 2006, while also working as a clinical intern and university instructor. Formative research posts took him to Lund University, Sweden (1997–98), then to the Max von Pettenkofer Institute at Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich (2001–04), before he moved to the United States as a DFG postdoctoral fellow and subsequently Research Assistant Professor at the Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute of Oregon Health and Science University in Portland (2004–09).

In 2010 he returned to Germany to establish the young investigator group “Immune Aging and Chronic Infections” at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig, supported by an ERC Starting Grant and a Helmholtz Young Investigator Award. He was appointed Junior Professor (W1) of Herpesvirus Immunology at Hannover Medical School (MHH) in 2011, Associate Professor (W2) in 2019, and Full Professor (W3) in 2024. Since 2021 he has headed the Department of Viral Immunology at HZI.

His research focuses on the lifelong interplay between cytomegalovirus (CMV) and the host immune system — particularly the phenomenon of immunological memory inflation, the molecular basis of CMV latency, and the rational engineering of CMV-based vaccine vectors for infectious diseases and cancer. His group combines mouse and primate animal models with human cohort studies, single-cell transcriptomics, and translational work including therapeutic antibody development and vaccine design against SARS-CoV-2. He has coordinated multiple international consortia (Helmholtz Virtual Institute VISTRIE, InfectERA eDEVILLI, MCMVaccine, COFONI) and secured competitive funding in excess of €10 million from the ERC, DFG, Helmholtz Association, BMBF, and EU programmes.

With over 100 peer-reviewed publications (Google Scholar h-index 47; >8000 citations), Prof. Cicin-Sain has been invited to lecture at Harvard Medical School, the NIH, UCSD, KAIST, the ETH Zurich, and numerous other institutions worldwide. He has supervised 14 graduated doctoral students and over 20 postdoctoral researchers, and teaches in MD and MSc programmes at MHH and TU Braunschweig. He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Virology and Medical Microbiology and Immunology, acts as ad hoc reviewer for Nature Microbiology, Nature Reviews Immunology, Cell Reports, eLife, and other leading journals, and evaluates grant applications for the ERC, DFG, Wellcome Trust, MRC, and several other national agencies. He co-founded and leads the Vaccine Study Group of the German Immunological Society and is a member of the Vaccine Task Force of the European Federation of Immunological Societies.