2 Jul 2026
At the Paul Ehrlich Contest in Ulm, 16 teams from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland put their medical knowledge and skills to the test. The team from LMU Munich prevailed against strong competition and brought home the silver medal to Munich.
with the Dean of Academic Affairs (University of Ulm), Prof. Tobias Böckers (on the left in the photo), team advisor Sebastian L
“We were thrilled to have made it to the finals after such a hard-fought competition. And the fact that things went so well in the finals made all the intensive preparation even more worthwhile,” says Zeinesh, a medical student who is participating in the Paul Ehrlich Contest for the first time.
For over a year, the five students prepared for the competition through weekly meetings, practicing how to make visual diagnoses within 200 milliseconds, discussing clinical cases, possible differential diagnoses, and appropriate further diagnostic tests together, and meeting with experts from LMU Medical Center for intensive training. In addition, they were able to gain valuable experience in a local competition, the Munich Pettenkofer Contest.
“We found the hands-on tasks particularly challenging. In addition to demonstrating anatomical structures on cadaver models, we had to perform a surgical nerve decompression and properly triage patients in a mass pileup,” says Moritz, who had previously worked as a tutor in the dissection course.
The Paul Ehrlich Contest has been held annually since 1998 at different universities each year and is organized primarily by Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. In addition to testing participants’ subject-matter knowledge, the contest gives them the opportunity to network and exchange ideas across national borders. “Bringing the contest to Munich in a few years would be our dream,” said the team’s two medical tutors, Dr. Michael Völkl and Sebastian Läufer.