Tobias Boettler was born in Berlin and graduated from Freiburg Medical School, Germany, in 2007. After two years of clinical training, he spent three years as a postdoctoral researcher at the La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology in La Jolla, California, USA. Back in Freiburg, he finished his clinical training and became an attending physician at the Department of Gastroenterology, Hepatology, Endocrinology and Infectious Diseases, University Hospital Freiburg. His research group has since focused on T cell immunology with a particular interest in virus-specific CD4 T cell responses in the context of viral hepatitis. Dr Boettler was an elected member of the programme committee of the German Association of the Study of the Liver (GASL) from 2016 to 2019.