Research

Glaciers are often an accurate indicator for climate change. Whilst it is comparatively easy to measure and quantify changes in regions such as the Alps, there is often only very little information available for the majority of the 215,000 glaciers worldwide. A new doctorate programme hopes to obtain more comprehensive and accurate data.

Fighting obesity with the cold: Experienced Humboldt fellow Dr. Mahendra Bishnoi is researching a pharmacological possibility at FAU to literally "melt" brown adipose tissue, which plays an important role in overweight and obesity, by means of a cold stimulus. Find out what else moves the passionate football fan in the interview.

A research group at FAU and the Helmholtz Institute Erlangen-Nürnberg for Renewable Energy have come up with a design aimed at significantly increasing the operational stability and life span of perovskite solar cells. The researchers’ findings have been published in the journal ‘Nature Energy’.

After going through a highly competitive selection process, researcher Prof. Dr. Stefan Uderhardt has been successful in his bid for project funding from the European Research Council (ERC). Uderhardt, who works at Department of Medicine 3 at Universitätsklinikum Erlangen, has been awarded a total of approximately 1.5 million euros for his project over the next five years.

Many of the fossils found worldwide are in the possession of natural history museums in the West or kept in private collections. The data collected about fossil finds and excavations are also predominantly located in richer countries. This is the subject of criticism from a research team led by Nussaibah Raja-Schoob, a doctoral candidate at the Chair of Palaeobiology at FAU.

Strengthening the immune response at the location where the virus enters the body. A team led by Prof. Dr. Klaus Überla and Prof. Dr. Matthias Tenbusch at the Institute of Clinical and Molecular Virology at FAU is currently conducting research into a vaccine that is administered as a nose or mouth spray and forms local antibodies in the mucous membranes. The project has received 280,000 euros of further funding.

A new study also confirms lower effectiveness of vaccines and decreasing immunity among those who have recovered from the disease, but the booster vaccine helps.

Prof. Dr. Matthias Braun from the Institute of Geography at FAU observes, measures and researches glaciers, ice shelves, mountain ranges and polar regions. For his latest round of measurements, he travelled to South Patagonia and took to the skies in the research aircraft Polar 5.

On Friday 10 December 2021, Bavarian State Minister of Science and the Arts Bernd Sibler visited Universitätsklinikum Erlangen at FAU and discussed the current research efforts for overcoming the Covid-19 pandemic with experts at the hospital.

As IBM (International Business Machines Cooperation) Fellow, Head of Science & Technology and Lead of IBM Research Quantum Europe at IBM Research, she is based in Switzerland and one of her many projects involves developing a new generation of computer processors: Dr. Heike Riel. In our interview, the FAU-Alumna gives an insight into her work for IBM and talks about her lasting connections to FAU.