Prof. Poets graduated from Hannover Medical School in June 1986. He received his medical training at the Dept. of Paediatric Pulmonology & Neonatology, Hannover Medical School, Hannover, Germany, and at the Dept. of Paediatric Respiratory Physiology, Brompton Hospital&National Heart & Lung Institute, London, UK. In 1994, he became director of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and the Paediatric Sleep Lab at Hannover Medical School.

Since 2002, he is Chair and Medical Director, Department of Neonatology, Univer­sity Hospital, Tuebingen, Germany. In 2008, he became chairman of the newly established Inderdisciplinary Center for Cleft Palate and Craniofacial Malformations at Tuebingen University Hospital. He has (co-)authored over 380 articles cited in PubMed, has contributed to over 120 review articles. His main research interests include the control of breathing, sleep apnoea/intermittent hypoxia, Sudden Infant Death, perinatal epidemiology and outcome research, innate immunity, and the conduct of multicentre clinical trials. With regard to the latter, he was coordinator and Co-PI of NEuroSIS, a large EU-funded multicentre study on inhaled steroids for BPD prevention, and was/is steering committee member of various multicentre trials (e.g., COT, ETTNO). In addi­tion, he serves on the DSMB of 2 large multicentre international trials (DOXA and HiLo).