Prof. Dr. Marie von Lilienfeld-Toal

Marie von Lilienfeld-Toal is Professor of Diversity Medicine at the Ruhr University Bochum and founding director of the first German Institute for Diversity Medicine.

Portrait Marie von Lilienfeld-Toal

Contact

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Marie von Lilienfeld-Toal completed her medical training at the universities of Lübeck, Bristol and Bonn. She graduated in 1998, followed a year later by a doctorate in Bonn. In the years that followed, she completed her specialist training in internal medicine at Bonn University Hospital. In 2007, she specialised in haematology and internal oncology. Her clinical career initially took her to Bonn University Hospital as a senior physician, where she worked from 2008 to 2013. In the meantime, she conducted research into the diagnosis and treatment of febrile neutropenia as part of her habilitation in 2010.

In 2013, Marie von Lilienfeld-Toal moved to Jena, where she worked as a senior physician at the University Hospital and also held a professorship for infection research. At the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology, she headed a research group on haematological and oncological issues. An important milestone in her career was the founding of the Diversity and Individual Medicine Working Group within the German Society for Haematology and Medical Oncology in 2021, which she still chairs today. Since July 2023, she has been setting up Germany's first Institute for Diversity Medicine at Ruhr-Universität Bochum.

Main research areas

Marie von Lilienfeld-Toal's research focuses on the question of how individual, social and cultural factors influence disease progression, diagnoses and therapies. The focus here is on the question of which factors are actually the cause of a phenomenon and which factors are surrogate parameters. One research objective is to eliminate surrogate parameters and instead better analyse the underlying cause. Another central research question deals with normality and health with a special focus on the methodology used to derive reference ranges for laboratory values.

Recent publications

Publications on PubMed