With the departure of Lothar Wieler, Lars Schaade will temporarily take over the office of President of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) in Berlin this Saturday. The previous RKI deputy chief will initially take over the post of Wieler for an indefinite period, which was said goodbye to the RKI on Tuesday.

It was announced in January that Wieler was leaving the RKI. The step was taken at his own request and in agreement with Federal Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach (SPD).

Corona pandemic put the office in the spotlight

Wieler is moving to the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) in Potsdam, where he will be spokesman for a research area on the digitization of medicine and healthcare. He had been at the head of the RKI since 2015. Wieler has been known to the general public since the Corona pandemic. He analyzed the infection situation at regular press conferences and repeatedly asked the population to act accordingly.

On Instagram, the RKI quoted from Schaade's parting words: According to this, Wieler was "a president to touch and to talk shop from public health to 1. FC Köln" for the employees. Wieler comes from the Rhineland.

Schaade, RKI Vice President since 2011, is a specialist in microbiology and infection epidemiology. He studied medicine at the Georg-August University in Göttingen, where he also received his doctorate in 1994. He was a research associate at the University Hospital Aachen and later worked in the "Communicable Diseases, AIDS, Epidemic Hygiene" department of the Federal Ministry of Health. In 2003, Schaade completed his habilitation in medical microbiology and virology at RWTH Aachen University.

The RKI has around 1500 employees. One of the goals is to protect the population from diseases. The RKI has several locations in Berlin (Wedding and Tempelhof), in Wildau in Brandenburg and in Wernigerode in the Harz Mountains. It was founded in 1891 as the Royal Prussian Institute for Infectious Diseases and headed by the doctor Robert Koch.