Prof. Dr. Thomas Illig, head of the Hannover Unified Biobank (HUB), has been elected deputy coordinator of the German Biobank Alliance (GBA). Illig will act as deputy to Prof. Dr. Michael Hummel until the end of the current GBA funding period. He was voted in during the steering committee meeting held on 2 March 2018.

Thomas Illig studied at the University of Regensburg where he also completed his doctorate within the Department of Cell Biology. He then worked at the Helmholtz Zentrum Muenchen research centre in Munich as a postdoc for five years. Illig was appointed group leader of the Molecular Epidemiology working group at the Institute for Epidemiology in 2001 and took over as head of the independent Molecular Epidemiology research unit at the Helmholtz Zentrum Muenchen in 2011. He has been scientific head of the Hannover Unified Biobank (HUB) at Hannover Medical School (MHH) since 2012 and deputy head and research coordinator of the Institute for Human Genetics at the MHH since 2016.

Thomas Illig has many years of experience in environmental, molecular, and genetic epidemiology as well as in human genetics. Besides biobanking, further research focuses include the analysis of Omics data for different diseases.