At this year’s Vienna BioCenter PhD Symposium held under the theme “Bringing it all back Home” and dedicated to celebrating Vienna BioCenter alumni, former IMBA PhD student Max Kellner was presented with one of the Vienna BioCenter PhD Awards 2025. The annual awards recognize outstanding doctoral theses defended within the Vienna BioCenter PhD Program and celebrate excellence in research across the campus.
Kellner’s PhD work in Josef Penninger's lab at IMBA explored how dangerous zoonotic viruses—such as Marburg virus and SARS-CoV-2—emerge from natural reservoirs like bats. In his thesis, “Preparing for Future Pandemics: Rapid Virus Identification in Resource-Limited Settings and Modeling Zoonotic Virus Infections in Natural Reservoir Species,” he developed bat-derived organoids to investigate why bats can carry highly pathogenic viruses without falling ill. His findings, published in Nature Immunology, revealed fundamental differences in antiviral immunity between bats and humans, particularly in mucosal tissues, offering insights into why bats remain resilient to infections that cause severe disease in humans.
This year’s Vienna BioCenter PhD Awards were presented to Irene Schwartz (Gijs Versteeg lab, Max Perutz Labs), Robert Kalis (Johannes Zuber lab, IMP), Víctor Sánchez de Medina Hernández (Yasin Dagdas lab, GMI), and Max Josef Kellner (Josef Penninger lab, IMBA).
About Max Kellner
Max Kellner obtained his master’s degree in molecular biology from the University of Vienna and gained international experience at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where he worked on CRISPR-based diagnostics. After contributing to the development of rapid SARS-CoV-2 tests at the Vienna BioCenter during the COVID-19 pandemic, he joined Josef Penninger’s lab at IMBA as a student of the Vienna BioCenter PhD Program in 2021. His innovative research on bat organoids earned him the Vienna BioCenter Out of the Box Award in 2023 and the ÖGMBT Life Sciences PhD Award Austria in 2025. Since April 2025, he Kellner leads a research group at the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research, studying how viral infections emerge at the interface between humans and animals.