Stefan H.E. Kaufmann is a German immunologist and microbiologist focusing on infection biology. He received his Dr. Rer. Nat. (PhD) at the University of Mainz in 1977 and his habilitation in immunology and microbiology at the Free University Berlin in 1981. He was a professor at the University of Ulm from 1987 to 1998. From 1993 to 2019, he was director of the Department of Immunology at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, for which he served as founding director. Since 2019, he has been director emeritus at this institute and also leader of an emeritus group on systems immunology at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences. He has been a member of the Max Planck Society since 1993. Since 1998, he has also been a professor of immunology and microbiology at the Charité Berlin. Since 2018, he has been a faculty fellow of the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study at Texas A&M University. He was appointed Senior Professor at Charité–Universitätsmedizin Berlin in September 2022.