Today, I received the award of an “outstanding new principal investigator (PI)” by a worldwide community of over 2500 new principal investigators (i.e., assistant professors). I’m proud of being the first person from Germany and the second person in Europe to have received this award to date. I was elected due to being an example for diversity in research (see my Nature and Science articles), for having a very good publication output (11 publications) since my start as a Freigeist Fellow in 2022, and for my helpful and valuable efforts to support other new PI’s to tackle common challenges. In the interview that accompanies this award, I share my research focus, my challenges, and my strategies in leading my own workgroup.

Photo: © S.Jonek/Bielefeld University

Today, my Working Life piece on the strategies that I use to lead an academic workgroup as a lip-reading scientist was published in Science. The strategies that I share in this article should be helpful for any principal investigator, disabled or not.

Photo: © SereDim/ndla.no