Martin Stanulla was born in Hanover in 1965. After completing his civilian service and studying Human Medicine at Hannover Medical School (MHH) and Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA, he began his career in 1994 at the MHH Children's Hospital. It was here that he was appointed to the post of Professor of Pediatrics in 1995 after completing a training program under the supervision of Prof. Dr. med. Hansjörg Riehm and Prof. Dr. med. Torsten Pietsch in the Department of Pediatric Hematology and Oncology, which dealt with the growth mechanisms of brain tumor cells.
After two initial years of clinical work, he went to the USA on a scholarship from the German Research Foundation and worked on a leukemia research project at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo. In Buffalo, he also studied epidemiology at the State University of New York and was awarded a Master of Science in Epidemiology in 1998. He then returned to the MHH to complete his residency in pediatrics and adolescent medicine and to help establish the leukemia research of the ALL-BFM study group, which is closely based on large clinical studies and thus guarantees a pronounced patient proximity. In 2002, Mr. Stanulla again went to the USA for a research stay, which he spent at the Stanford School of Medicine in California.
From 2004, he held the Madeleine Schickedanz Endowed Professorship for Molecular Hematology (C3) at the MHH for four years, before accepting the W2 professorship for Molecular Pediatrics at the Medical Faculty of the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel in 2008. In 2013, Mr. Stanulla then accepted the W3 professorship for Molecular Pediatric Hematology and Oncology and returned to the MHH. Here he researches how leukemia develops in children and adolescents and looks for factors that are responsible for the progression of the disease under therapy. It is particularly important for him to link laboratory research directly with clinical studies and to comprehensively characterize leukaemia patients on the basis of genetic characteristics in order to provide them with an optimally adapted therapy.