Melanie Brinkmann studied biology at the Georg-August University Göttingen and the Humboldt University Berlin in Germany. During her PhD at the Institute of Virology, Hannover Medical School, Germany, she studied how the tumorvirus Kaposi sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) manipulates its host. For her postdoctoral time she joined Hidde Ploeghs laboratory at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, which is affiliated with the Massachusettes Institute of Technology in Cambridge, USA. During these four years she worked on highly specialized sentinels of the innate immune system, so called pattern recognition receptors. These cellular receptors play an essential role for the detection of viral infections.
Since July 2010 Melanie Brinkmann is head of a research group at the HZI.
From 2012 to 2018, Melanie Brinkmann was assistant professor (W1 Innate Antiviral Immunity) at the Institute of Virology at the Hannover Medical School.
From 2018 to 2022, she held an associate professorship (W2 Virus Genetics) at the Institute of Genetics at the TU Braunschweig. Since December 2022, she is full professor (W3) of Virology and Innate Immunity at the Institute of Genetics.
Melanie Brinkmann received the PhD Award of the Hannover Medical School (2004) and the Robert-Koch-Postdoc Award for her postdoctoral work on the oncogenic herpesvirus KSHV (2007). In 2016 she was awarded with the Science Award of the Signal Transduction Society. For her engagement during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, Melanie Brinkmann received the ScienceHero Award of the Conference of Biology Departments in 2022.
Melanie Brinkmann is elected advisory board member of the German Society of Virology (GfV - Link), speaker of the DFG Research Unit DEEP-DV (FOR5200 - Link), and founding member of the BMBF-funded network of female researchers in the area of infection research "Infect-Net" (Link). She is member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Virology (Link), EMBO Reports (Link), and EMBO Molecular Medicine (Link) and reviewing editor for eLife (Link).
From December 2021 to April 2023 she was vice-chair of the COVID-19 Expert Council of the German Government (Link).