Prof. Dr. Gerd Sutter studied veterinary medicine in Munich from 1981 to 1988. In his doctoral thesis, which was supervised by Prof. Anton Mayr, he dealt with MVA, the modified vaccinia virus Ankara, which has accompanied him throughout his entire scientific life. As a postdoctoral fellow, he went to the USA and worked at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases under Bernard Moss, one of the world's leading smallpox virologists. This period was very formative for Gerd Sutter. Back in Germany, he worked as a group leader at the Helmholtz Center Munich, and in 1999, he qualified as a professor in the subject of Virology at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine in Munich. In 2003, Gerd Sutter moved to the Paul Ehrlich Institute and headed the Department of Virology as Director. In 2009, he returned to his alma mater when he was appointed to the Chair of Virology in the newly formed Institute for Infectious Medicine and Zoonoses at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine. The main topics of his work continues to be viral vector vaccines and zoonotic viral diseases.