Research

FAU is a partner of the ‘Global Market Leaders Innovation Day’ initiative run by the German financial magazine WirtschaftsWoche, which is to be held in Erlangen on 8 September 2020. Renowned researchers and young talents from FAU will present their research and ideas on the main focal topic ‘energy and climate’.

The international project ‘Age(ing) as future’ at the Institute of Psychogerontology at FAU initiated a study within the context of the coronavirus pandemic in April. It investigates personal experiences, attitudes, worries and behaviour with respect to Covid-19 in Germany and Hong Kong.

Researchers from the German Centre for Immunotherapy (DZI) at Universitätsklinikum Erlangen have conducted tests to detect antibodies against the coronavirus, as diseases such as arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease or psoriasis are treated with medication that inhibits inflammation and modulates the immune response. A detailed corona antibody study has now been published in the scientific journal Nature Communications.

In conjunction with the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) (Federal Criminal Police Office) and IT company Secunet, FAU will be working on a technological solution during the next two years that will allow car number plates to be read even on blurred images.

A research team led by Dr. med. Moritz Leppkes of FAU has discovered that in Covid-19 infections certain white blood cells, the neutrophilic granulocytes, are activated particularly aggressively, and then agglomerate and form nets known as neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) in the blood vessels of the lungs.

On August 1, Kristian Franze will become one of the directors of the Max-Planck-Zentrum für Physik und Medizin (MPZPM) - at the same time he will become director of the Institute for Medical Physics and Microtissue Engineering at the FAU. In an interview, Kristian Franze explains what he is planning to do in Erlangen, where the focus of his work will be in the future - and why he is looking forward to a culture shock.

The EU is supporting the economy with enormous sums of money: politically well-connected companies with former EU Commissioners in their ranks could exploit the crisis to their advantage. A research team from FAU and the University of Lucerne has examined how the financial market reacts to the recruitment of former members of the European Commission and has shown that such fears are justified.

The new research training group ‘FAIR – Fine-tuning of the adaptive immune response’ at FAU aims to help better understand the molecular regulatory mechanisms of immune response.

How does the immune system manage to fight invasive pathogens without damaging the body? And why does it sometimes turn against the body after all? A team from the Chair of Genetics at FAU has been exploring these questions together with the university hospitals in Erlangen and Regensburg.