Karolin Kirchgaesser

Vita

Karolin Kirchgaesser is a licensed physician and an early career legal scholar at Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Law. Her research is at the intersection of law and medicine, with a focus on psychiatry and German guardianship law.

From 2012-2020, she studied medicine at the University of Leipzig in Saxony, Germany, including stays abroad in Russia, Kosovo, France, and Ireland. From 2014-2018, she led the seminar "Medical Peace Work" for medical students at Leipzig University, which focused on conflict and health, social determinants of health, and access to healthcare. In 2018, she started a medical doctoral programme at Heidelberg University, which led her to Burkina Faso. She assisted in a research collaboration on adolescent health between the Heidelberg Institute for Global Health at Heidelberg University Hospital, the Centre de Recherche en Santé de Nouna (CRSN) in Burkina Faso, and other research institutes (ARISE Network). She has been a registered doctor since 2020 and worked in the Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics at Elbe Klinikum Stade until 2021.

From 2020 to 2025, she studied law at Bucerius Law School in Hamburg and, in 2022, at the Université Catholique de Lyon in France. From 2021, she worked as a student assistant at the Institute for Medical Law at Bucerius Law School. In 2025, she passed the first state examination in law.

Since August 2025, she is a research associate in the research group of Prof. Dr. Anne Röthel.