Christian Drosten is a physician and virologist. He works in the fields of viral diversity, ecology and epidemiology across the different evolutionary levels, from the natural reservoir of a pathogen right through to a global outbreak in the human population. Christian Drosten and his team have developed a strategy to describe significant new viruses, based on advanced cell culture systems and multi-pronged molecular characterisation. In addition, they have developed new bioinformatic approaches to identify viral sequences in meta-transcriptomic data. He and his working group are looking at the concept of the species barrier, which they believe has functional correlates in terms of the interferon system and other cellular interactions. He has published over 400 peer-reviewed articles.