What are the arguments in favour of conducting research together and not in competition with each other?

There are essentially three reasons:

1. There are large, complex research projects that can be carried out more successfully together - especially thanks to the different areas of expertise.
2. For me, the aim of research is to understand things better and ultimately improve people's health and well-being. In my experience, it tends to be the large-scale, often interdisciplinary approaches that achieve this goal.
3. Personally, I simply enjoy working in a large, diverse team more. You can also learn new things every day.

Why are you involved in the NUM?

The NUM is aimed at collaborative work in university medicine - an important aspect for me. I also had the opportunity to coordinate an exciting project, the COVID evidence ecosystem CEOsys, in the first funding phase. The aim of CEOsys was to identify, evaluate and summarise scientific evidence for important medical and social issues and translate it into recommendations for action.

What was the biggest success in your NUM research project?

Thanks to the highly committed efforts of many colleagues at CEOsys, we were able to produce a wide range of evidence syntheses on important clinical issues as well as public health issues in a short space of time. During the critical phase of the COVID pandemic, these were incorporated into the S3 guideline on the treatment of patients with COVID-19 and the S3 guideline on the prevention of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in schools.

Imagine you are at a barbecue with friends. Describe what you do in one sentence.

Together with my team, we try to critically review and summarise research findings from studies worldwide and make trustworthy results available quickly for recommendations and decisions.