Dr. Nico Joël Halwe is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Science Outreach and Pandemic Preparedness (LBI SOAP) in Vienna, Austria in the lab of Prof. Dr. Florian Krammer. Here, he focuses primarily on establishing a metagenomic virus discovery pipeline, following virus characterization approaches in vitro and in vivo.
Until May 2025, he was a PostDoc at the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institute in the Institute of Diagnostic Virology under supervision of Prof. Dr. Martin Beer in Greifswald – Isle of Riems in Germany, where he also completed his PhD from 2020 – 2023. During his PhD, he focused on the in vivo characterization of the newly discovered bat-borne influenza A virus H9N2, as well as the fitness determination of emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants in diverse animal models. During his PostDoc at the FLI, he worked on the development and testing of safe and protective live-attenuated SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidates in animal models, and he investigated the susceptibility of lactating dairy cattle to an experimental H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b influenza A virus infection. Moreover, he continued his efforts in bat-borne H9N2 influenza A virus characterization and its surveillance in Africa.
