Kai Papenfort is the new Professor of General Microbiology. He is studying how microbes recognise members of their community.

In 2006 he moved to the UK to work as a Marie Curie fellow at the Institute of Food Research in Norwich where he studied small RNAs in Salmonella Typhimurium. After that, he returned to Germany to receive his PhD in 2010 in Genetics/Microbiology at the Humboldt University, Berlin. Since his PhD, he has worked as a postdoctoral research fellow with Jörg Vogel at the Institute for Molecular Infection Biology in Würzburg (Germany) and with Bonnie Bassler at Princeton University (USA).

In 2015, he was appointed as Professor of Microbiology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, Germany. Work in his group focuses on gene regulation by bacterial noncoding RNA molecules and intercellular communication among microbes.