Maike Sander

Maike Sander (born August 16, 1967, in Göttingen, Germany) is a German-American physician and scientist. She is known for her research on diabetes. Since November 2022, she has served as Scientific Director and Chair of the Board of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) in Berlin, making her the first woman to head one of the Helmholtz Health Centers. In January 2025, she was elected Vice-President of Helmholtz Health.

Education and career Sander was raised in Göttingen, Germany. Sander graduated with a medical degree from Heidelberg University in 1994. From 1994 to 1999, she was a research fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, having previously participated in an exchange program there in 1991.

In addition to her primary appointments, Sander was Co-Director of the Center on Diabetes at the Institute of Engineering in Medicine at UC San Diego from 2014 to 2022. From 2019 to 2022, she was an Einstein Visiting Fellow at the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH). Her work investigates how dynamic changes in gene expression, transcription factor binding, and chromatin structure regulate beta cell differentiation, identity, and functional maintenance. These studies have revealed fundamental mechanisms of cell fate determination and cellular plasticity in both normal pancreatic development and the pathogenesis of diabetes. More recently, her research has centered on developing platforms to generate insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells from human pluripotent stem cells for therapeutic applications.

Awards and honors Sander received the Grodsky Award of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation in 2008 and became a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation in 2011. In 2017 she was elected to the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and in 2020 she was elected to the Association of American Physicians. She received the Albert Renold Prize from the European Association for the Study of Diabetes in 2022. She was elected to the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 2024 and to the European Molecular Biology Organization in 2025. She was elected to the Academia Europaea in 2025.

Selected publications