Prof. Dr. Annette Peters

Director of the Institute of Epidemiology, Helmholtz Zentrum München

Prof. Dr. Annette Peters is Director of the Institute of Epidemiology at Helmholtz Munich – German Research Center for Environmental Health and is full Professor of Epidemiology at the Ludwig Maximilians Universität München, Germany. She studied biology and mathematics in Germany and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, USA.

She has a long-standing interest in understanding the role of ambient air pollution in contributing to exacerbation and initiation of chronic diseases. Furthermore, she did pioneer work identifying the link between ambient particulate matter and cardiovascular disease.

Today, Peters heads the population-based KORA cohort initiated in the mid-eighties in Augsburg, Germany and funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research between 2008 and 2014. Following the first measurements in 1999, she has continuously grown the research program on environmental measurements for air pollution and other environmental exposures in the KORA study region.

Moreover, she is principal investigator of the German National Cohort, which investigates prospectively 205,000 men and women. She is responsible for building its central biorepository. Here, the goal is to implement a nation-wide beyond the state of the art large-scale epidemiological study including innovative biobanking for all members and magnet resonance tomography assessments for 30,000 participants. Peters research interest are age-related and chronic diseases. Specifically, she strives to improve the understanding of disease development by integrating lifestyle and environmental factors, molecular and imaging markers to assess their relative impact on cardiometabolic diseases. Finally yet importantly, she started additional data collecting in order to contribute to fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.

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