A Themed Issue in Honor of Professor Stefan Schwarz—Antimicrobial Resistance of Bacteria of Animal Origin: Diagnostics, Monitoring, Mechanisms and Epidemiology

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue will honor Prof. Dr. Stefan Schwarz for his outstanding contributions to the field of antimicrobial resistance. 

Prof. Dr. Stefan Schwarz has been the Managing Director of the Institute of Microbiology and Epizootics, Department of Veterinary Medicine, Freie Universität Berlin, since October 2016.

His impressive career includes significant leadership roles at several institutions. From January 2008 to September 2016, he headed the Research Unit "Molecular Microbiology & Antimicrobial Resistance" at the Institute of Farm Animal Genetics, Friedrich-Loeffler-Institute (FLI) in Neustadt-Mariensee. Prior to that, he held various positions at the Federal Agricultural Research Centre (FAL) in Neustadt-Mariensee, including head of the "Product and Process Quality, Environment" Department (June 2001–December 2007); head of the "Molecular Microbiology and Diagnostics" Research Unit at the Institute for Animal Science and Animal Behaviour (January 1998–May 2001); and head of the "Diagnostics" Research Unit at the Institute for Small Animal Research, Celle (October 1992–December 1997). He also served as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of Bacteriology and Immunology (April 1988–September 1992) and the Institute of Virology (February 1987–March 1988) at Justus-Liebig University Gießen.

Prof. Schwarz's extensive education includes specialist veterinarian qualifications in microbiology (August 1991), molecular genetics and gene technology (March 2001), and epidemiology (May 2002). He earned the title of Diplomate of the European College of Veterinary Microbiology in October 2021. He received his DVM (Dr. med. vet.) from Justus-Liebig University Gießen in May 1987, where he also studied veterinary medicine (October 1981–November 1986) and obtained his license to practice veterinary medicine (Approbation) in December 1986. He completed his habilitation in microbiology at the University for Veterinary Medicine Hannover in December 1995 and was appointed Apl. Professor of Microbiology at the same institution in October 1998.

Prof. Schwarz is also active in various professional organizations. He has been the head of the interdisciplinary expert group "Antibiotic Resistance in bacteria of animal origin" of the German Veterinary Medical Society (DVG) since May 2002. He has also served as the head (June 2023–June 2025 and June 2006–June 2008) and vice-head (June 2004–June 2006) of the "Bacteriology and Mycology" division of the DVG. Since January 2005, he has been an Advisor, Voting member, and the Secretary of the "Veterinary Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing" subcommittee of the Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute and a member of several of its working groups.

Prof. Schwarz is a prolific author, having published 632 papers in national and international peer-reviewed journals, over 30 book chapters, 2 books, over 800 abstracts in national and international meeting proceedings, and over 600 lectures in Germany and abroad. His scholarly impact is reflected in his h-index of 97, i10-index of 494, and 42,173 citations (Google Scholar, 22 April 2025). He has also held numerous editorial positions, including Senior Editor of the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (since July 2011) and Editorial Board Member of Berliner und Münchener Tierärztliche Wochenschrift (since January 2013).

Prof. Schwarz's contributions have been recognized through numerous awards, including the Award of the Academy for Animal Health (AfT) in 1996, the Award of the German Veterinary Medical Society (DVG) in 1997, the Martin-Lerche Scientific Award of the DVG in 2018, and the Walter Frei Award of the VetSuisse Faculty Zürich/Switzerland in 2020. He has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina since 2020.

In addition to his other roles, Prof. Schwarz holds visiting professorships at the Henan Agricultural University, Zhengzhou, China (since January 2024), and the College of Veterinary Medicine, China Agricultural University (CAU), Beijing, China (since October 2014). He is also the spokesperson for the FAO Reference Centre for Antimicrobial Resistance at Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany (since November 2019). He has been a guest scientist at St. Thomas’s Hospital London, the National Veterinary Laboratory in Copenhagen, the University of Oxford, and the University of Washington.

Prof. Schwarz's research interests and activities encompass a wide range of topics related to antimicrobial resistance, including antibiotic resistance in Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria; the structure and regulation of antibiotic resistance genes; molecular genetics and the epidemiology of mobile genetic elements; resistance-mediating mutations; the monitoring of antimicrobial susceptibility; the development of susceptibility testing methods; the development of clinical breakpoints and epidemiological cut-off values; the development of quality control ranges; and the molecular typing of bacteria.

In recognition of your outstanding expertise, we are pleased to invite you to contribute a manuscript to this Special Themed Issue honoring Professor Stefan Schwarz—Antimicrobial Resistance of Bacteria of Animal Origin: Diagnostics, Monitoring, Mechanisms and Epidemiology.

This issue will be published in Antibiotics (IF 4.3, ISSN 2079-6382), an open-access journal published by MDPI (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/antibiotics).

Dr. Igor Loncaric
Prof. Dr. Séamus Fanning
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Antibiotics is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• antimicrobial resistance
• animals
• resistance genes
• mechanism of resistance
• MRSA
• ESBL
• staphylococci
• enterobacterales