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

As a consequence of my successful application to the Volkswagen Foundation, I am pleased to announce that I was selected as one of the few people across all scientific disciplines to be awarded a prestigious Freigeist fellowship. The funding included in this fellowship enables me to become a junior research group leader by starting my own workgroup at Bielefeld University. This makes it possible for us to conduct a six-year interdisciplinary research project called “Plasticity-led evolution in the phenotype of a freshwater snail: from the epigenome to genetic change”. With this research project, we will be tackling the unconventional idea that phenotypic plasticity may lead evolution by inducing non-random genetic change. The results of this project may allow future scientists to better predict evolution and everybody to prepare accordingly. A more detailed description of the project can be found in the German press release from Bielefeld University.

Here you can find a short video by the Volkswagen Foundation that explains what a “Freigeist” is.