Dr. Elsayed M. Abdelwhab is the head of the laboratory for avian influenza virus in the Institute of molecular virology and cell biology, Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut, Germany. He obtained his Ph.D. from Freie-Universität Berlin in 2011 and granted fellowships from Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). In his laboratory, he is leading a research team to study the molecular biology of influenza viruses. His main interests are the mechanism for the evolution of high pathogenic avian influenza viruses from low pathogenic precursors, interspecies transmission, vaccine efficacy and molecular epidemiology.