Tilman Kühn takes up professorial chair in Public Health Nutrition

In mid-November, MedUni Vienna and the University of Vienna appointed Tilman Kühn to the dual professorial chair in Public Health Nutrition (§98). At MedUni Vienna, the nutritionist and epidemiologist from Heidelberg is assigned to the Center for Public Health. His principal areas of interest are the dietary aspects of public health.

Tilman Kühn is focussed on the prevention of diet-related diseases (with an emphasis on obesity and cancer) and on plant-based diets. Kühn’s dual professorship in Public Health Nutrition at MedUni Vienna and the University of Vienna covers a comparatively new discipline, which draws on aspects of public health and nutritional science and, in particular, encompasses the social, economic and political contexts that impact the lives of certain population groups, making them more prone to diet-related disease.

"The consideration of nutrition as an important determinant of individual health is fundamentally changing in light of the pressures imposed by climate and environmental crises," explains Kühn. "The EAT-Lancet Commission’s 2019 report shows that, if nothing else, eating a more plant-based diet will be critical in helping to achieve the 1.5° global warming target from the Paris Agreement. Our research is therefore aimed at obtaining a better understanding of the health aspects of a more plant-based diet. Alongside this, the main focus is on the prevention of chronic diseases through nutritional interventions in ageing societies."

About Tilman Kühn
Following his diploma in Nutritional Sciences at the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg, Tilman Kühn graduated with an MSc in Public Health Nutrition from the University of Applied Sciences in Fulda in 2010. He obtained a PhD in Epidemiology after three years as a research assistant at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg in 2014. Kühn then held positions as a working group leader at DKFZ and as a lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast, and completed his habilitation degree in epidemiology at Heidelberg University Hospital in 2020.