Sylvia Knapp receives Prize of the City of Vienna

Sylvia Knapp, Professor of Infection Biology at the Medical University of Vienna, was awarded the Prize of the City of Vienna in the category Medical Sciences. The awards for outstanding achievements in culture and science were presented by the City Councillor for Culture and Science, Veronica Kaup-Hasler, in a festive ceremony in the ballroom of Vienna City Hall.

The prizes of the City of Vienna have been awarded annually since 1947 in the fields of architecture, fine arts, literature, music, journalism, popular education and science. They are awarded in recognition of a life's work to date and are endowed with 10,000 euros each.

The main focus of Sylvia Knapp's scientific work is research into the innate immune response in bacterial and viral infections.

Sylvia Knapp, born in 1968 in Innsbruck, studied medicine in Vienna and Berlin and then began her residency in internal medicine at the Clinic for Internal Medicine I. She then completed a PhD programme at the University of Amsterdam. In 2004 Knapp habilitated in internal medicine at MedUni Vienna and in 2006 she completed her doctorate (PhD) at the University of Amsterdam. In the same year she took over as Head of the Research Laboratory of the Department of Infectious Diseases and Tropical Medicine at MedUni Vienna and became Principal Investigator at the Center for Molecular Medicine (CeMM) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In 2012 she took up the professorship for "Infection Biology" at MedUni Vienna. She has been a full member of the Mathematical and Natural Sciences Class of the Austrian Academy of Sciences since 2022.