Rate My Professor Christoph Hess

Professor Christoph Hess is Professor of Experimental Medicine in the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge, appointed in 2019. He holds dual senior academic appointments as Professor of Medicine and Head of the Medical Outpatient Division and the Clinical Immunology Service at the University Hospital in Basel, Switzerland. Since 2004, he has led a research group in the Department of Biomedicine at the University of Basel. Prior to these roles, Hess conducted postdoctoral research on T cell migration at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and received clinical training in Internal Medicine and Clinical Immunology in Basel and at Imperial College London.

Hess completed medical school in Zürich and Lausanne and earned his M.D. and Ph.D. at the University of Basel. His research focuses on the translational aspects of lymphocyte function and its metabolic basis, seeking to understand disorders of immunometabolic regulation. The Hess Lab explores the metabolic repertoire of immune cells, including metabolic enzymes and pathways, nutrient sensors, metabolic checkpoint kinases, and epigenetic programming of metabolic genes, to delineate how metabolism regulates immune function in health and disease. Key findings include acetate's role in regulating T cell metabolism during infection and inflammation (Balmer et al., Immunity 2016; Cell Metabolism 2020), TGF-β-mediated metabolic suppression of CD4+ T cells in cancer (Dimeloe et al., Science Signaling 2019), and hypermetabolic phenotypes in primary antibody deficiencies such as SDHA mutations in persistent polyclonal B cell lymphocytosis (Burgener et al., Nat Immunol 2019). He is a Principal Investigator at the Cambridge Institute for Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Disease and serves on the steering committee of the Cambridge Immunology Network. Hess was awarded the Cloëtta Prize. Notable publications include "A metabolic dependency of EBV can be targeted to hinder B cell transformation" (Science, 2024), "Extracellular Mg2+ regulates memory CD8+ T cell effector maturation via LFA-1" (Cell, 2022), "A patient-centric characterization of systemic recovery from SARS-CoV-2 infection" (Nature Immunology, 2023), "Serine is an essential metabolite for effector T cell expansion" (Cell Metabolism, 2017), and "Rapid effector function of memory CD8+ T cells requires an immediate-early glycolytic switch" (Nature Immunology, 2013).