Medical Microbiology and Immunology covers all aspects of the interrelationship between infectious agents and their hosts [1]. Among the major topics covered are microbial and viral pathogenesis and the immunological host response to infections. The journal also publishes information from other fields of microbiology, including mycology and parasitology.

(https://link.springer.com/journal/430). In the past five decades, when the field has been divided into bacteriology, parasitology and virology, it occurred that one of the editors-in-chief was a virologist who was either more engaged in clinical virology (Richard Haas) or more in basic virus research (Rudolf Rott). Having worked as a clinical virologist, I was honoured to continue that tradition, which I am now going to pass on to my colleague Matthias J. Reddehase.

Being one of the leading scientists in CMV basic research focusing on virus-host interactions in preclinical models of hematopoietic cell transplantation [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. Matthias J. Reddehase is more than capable of filling my position as editor of this magazine. Born in 1954 in the Bavarian Alps, he has studied biology, chemistry and physics at the University of Heidelberg, where he received training in basic cellular immunology performing a master-equivalent thesis at the German Cancer Research Center (1979–1980). Joining the group of Ulrich H. Koszinowski, then at the Federal Research Center for Virus Diseases of Animals in Tuebingen, he switched to viral immunology with a focus on cytomegalovirus (CMV) pathogenesis and immune control, culminating in a doctoral thesis on the immunogenicity of viral intranuclear regulatory proteins [11] and the identification of the first antigenic peptide specified by a CMV [12]. In 1989, he was promoted to senior lecturer for Microbiology at the University of Tuebingen. After a period as a research group leader at the Department of Virology of the Medical Faculty of the University of Ulm, he was appointed in 1994 to Full Professor and Director of the Institute for Virology at the University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg-University in Mainz. His research in Mainz was and still is aimed at establishing models for an immunotherapy of CMV disease [13, 14]. As a service for the community of medical microbiologists and immunologists, Matthias J. Reddehase represented these scientific fields as a member of the Grants Committee for Collaborative Research Centers of the German Research Foundation (1999–2004). In acknowledgement of his fundamental contributions to CMV virology and immunotherapy, he was honoured in 2008 with the renowned Aronson Award of the Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, the home institution of the Medical Microbiology and Immunology founder and first editor Robert Koch. Matthias J. Reddehase has gained experience and coordination skills as the editor of meanwhile two editions of a comprehensive 2-volume book covering essentially all aspects of cytomegalovirus research, ranging from cutting-edge basic science to clinical science and even health economy [15, 16]. In service for Medical Microbiology and Immunology, he organized and guest-edited two MMI Special Issues on Cytomegaloviruses in 2008 and 2015 [17, 18]. As his most recent contribution to MMI, he reported on a new promising approach to fight CMV disease [19, 20].

We are looking forward to having him as new Editor-in-Chief of Medical Microbiology and Immunology, being responsible for the subject area Virology and joining the Editors-in-Chief Volkhard A. J. Kempf (Bacteriology) and Bernhard Fleischer (Immunology).