Hypoxia and Metabolic Adaptation: What and How to Track

Professor Manfred Westphal was born in Hamburg, where he also went to school and studied
medicine at the University Hospital in Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE). The academic year of 1978-1979
was spent at the Medical School of the University of Glasgow as scholar of the German National
Scholarship Foundation. Based on his scientific research in experimental neuro-endocrinology as a
medical student, he obtained a research education grant from the German Research Foundation
(Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) and became a research fellow at the University of California
San Francisco in the Hormone Research Laboratory with C.H. Li. His main interest during that time
was neuro-endocrinology focusing on peptide biology of opiate peptides, particularly ¿-endorphine. He
also started to study cell biology of brain tumors with Charles B. Wilson. This work was continued
after his return to the University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf in 1984 where the Laboratory of Brain
Tumor Biology in the department for neurosurgery was founded.
In 2002 he was elected as director of the Neurosurgical Department at the University of Düsseldorf
and shortly afterwards conformed as director and chair of the Neurosurgical Department at the UKE.
With the focus on Neurooncology and vascular neurosurgery Professor Westphal has published 265
original papers, in addition to numerous book chapters and book editions.