Prof. Bernd Kaina

Bernd Kaina is a Professor Emeritus and former Director of Toxicology at the University Medical Center Mainz, Germany, and holds a doctoral degree in genetics from the University of Halle. He completed his postdoctoral training at the Institute of Genetics in Gatersleben and continued his studies on DNA repair at the Department of Molecular Biology in Leiden, Netherlands, at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg and, as a Heisenberg fellow, at the Department of Genetics of the Nuclear Research Center in Karlsruhe, Germany. In 1993, he was appointed head of the Division of Applied Toxicology and 2003 chairman of the Institute of Toxicology at the University of Mainz. His working field includes the genotoxic effects of environmental carcinogens as well as cancer therapeutics, the sensitivity of hematopoietic cells, the mechanisms of cell death, senescence, mutagenesis, and carcinogenesis with special emphasis on DNA repair and DNA damage signaling. He is the author of more than 300 peer-reviewed papers and numerous book chapters and serves as an editorial board member and reviewer for several scientific journals.