Research

Dr. Michaela Kramer, media education specialist at FAU, has investigated the influence smartphone photography and posting images on social media has on shaping young people’s sense of identity. She has drawn up a typology describing the different ways young people can present themselves via photos and what that says about their developing personalities.

Family physicians, or GP’s, are the first port of call for questions concerning health or illness. They therefore need information sources which cover various medical fields whilst still being suitable for use in individual cases. A team of researchers at FAU have investigated how GP’s can access medical information and what they look for in digital material.

Children, young people and media is a topic which sparks heated debate. Should children steer clear altogether of televisions, computers or smartphones? Is it true that young people are not interested in books? These are just some examples of the questions investigated by researchers from the Institute of Book Studies at FAU. The researchers discovered one crucial aspect: the key to using both analogue and digital media is literacy.

New method: researchers investigate how tissue properties influence cell migration.

Disease-causing microbes as well as cancer cells gang together to form larger structures - and only then become dangerous to humans. Scientists at the FAU, the Max-Planck-Zentrum für Physik und Medizin in Erlangen and the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden have now presented a new mathematical model in the renowned journal Physical Review Letters that describes this process. And thus helps to find new approaches in the fight against infections and tumours.

Autumn marks the beginning of the high season for rhinoviruses. They cause cold symptoms, which can be dangerous for children suffering from bronchial asthma. Scientists at Universitätsklinikum Erlangen (UKER) have been working as part of an international team to find a way of preventing this from happening.

Scientists at FAU and their colleagues in Spain have discovered that astrocytes in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) play an important role in the brain in goal-directed behaviour when weighing up the advantages and disadvantages of a decision. They have recently published their findings in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

The clock drawing test is a means of diagnosing disruptions to spatial orientation and dementias. Scientists at the Pattern Recognition Lab at the Department of Computer Science at FAU have fed artificial neural networks data from 2500 of these tests to teach them to evaluate them independently.

Department of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy in Erlangen publishes results of a national study into mental strain experienced by healthcare workers during the coronavirus pandemic

Teams of researchers at universities in Erlangen, Hanover, Münster and Regensburg have received six million euros in funding from the German government in order to develop a new CAR T cell therapy.