Dr Thomas Gersdorf
Course: Practicing Strategy
Dr Thomas Gersdorf is a Senior Director at BioNTech SE in Mainz/Germany, where he currently serves as the Chief of Staff to the CEO and COO. He previously spent three and a half years at McKinsey & Company, where he advised clients predominantly from the life science industries on topics such as strategy, organisation, research and development, product development, procurement and corporate transformation engagement.
He is most passionate about new developments in the life sciences and biotech and, more generally, about the management of technological change in knowledge-intensive industries (e.g. personalised medicine, electric mobility, the future of work).
Dr Gersdorf holds an MSc ETH in Physics and earned his doctorate in Management at D-MTEC. His thesis, completed under the supervision of Professor Georg von Krogh, examined how pharmaceutical companies should organise and lead research collaborations with external institutes. He has been teaching strategy lectures at the Chair of Strategic Management and Innovation for many years and has also frequently been a guest lecturer for a variety of D-MTEC programmes.