Kristina Lorenz heads the Translational Research department and the Cardiovascular Pharmacology research group. She is also Head of the Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology at Julius-Maximilians-Universität of Würzburg.
Lorenz’s scientific work centres on signal pathways in cardiac insufficiency and cardiac hypertrophy with a special focus on protein kinases and G-protein-coupled receptors. She is involved in the following Collaborative Research Centres (Sonderforschungsbereiche, SFB) of the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft): SFB 1525 Cardioimmune Interfaces, SFB/Transregio 296 Local Control of Thyroid Hormone Action (LocoTact) and the Drug Discovery Hub Dortmund (DDHD).
Lorenz wrote her PhD thesis at the Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology in Würzburg. She worked in Dresden and Würzburg as a post-doc researcher and research group leader. From 2013 to 2015, she was a professor of Molecular Pharmacology at the Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology and at the Comprehensive Heart Failure Centre in Würzburg. In 2016, the trained pharmacologist was appointed Professor of Mechanisms of Cardiovascular Disease at the University of Duisburg-Essen and began her directorship at ISAS in the same year. In 2019, she took over the professorship for Pharmacology and Toxicology in Würzburg (as successor to Prof. Dr M. J. Lohse).
Lorenz is or has been involved in research groups and the programme commission at the German Cardiac Society (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Kardiologie, DGK), is a founding member of the Young Scientists’ Forum of the German Pharmacological Society (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Pharmakologie, DGP) and a member of the Board of the DGP, where she was recently elected as deputy chair. Furthermore, Lorenz is involved in various mentoring programmes for young researchers as well as the Animal Welfare Commission at the North Rhine-Westphalia State Agency for Nature, Environment and Consumer Protection (Landesamt für Natur, Umwelt und Verbraucherschutz Nordrhein-Westfalen, LANUV), the Ethics Commission at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität of Würzburg, and acts as an ombudsperson on the misconduct commission there.