Every year, International Women's Day on 8 March draws attention to the importance of equal rights and diversity in all areas of society - including science. Although women research, teach and drive innovation as a matter of course today, they are still underrepresented in many scientific disciplines, especially in leading positions. Yet their perspectives and ideas are indispensable for scientific progress.
To mark International Women's Day, we are introducing five young female scientists who are all working together in the NUM Platform for Imaging Data - RACOON.
PD Dr Judith Herrmann from the Academic Medical Centre of Tübingen has been part of the four-person coordination team of the NUM Platform for Imaging Data, RACOON (Radiological Cooperative Network), since July. Together with clinical and technical partners, she is working to further expand a cross-site, user-friendly Research Infrastructure that enables efficient, standardised and sustainable multi-centre image-based research.
She heads the reporting department, the seemingly dry but indispensable engine that structures a complex project like RACOON. Community and outreach are particularly close to her heart. Creating transparency, connecting people and making joint activities visible are topics that she drives forward with great commitment. For Judith, RACOON thrives on dialogue and bringing together different areas of expertise in a productive way. As part of the coordination team, she would like to further develop RACOON both strategically and organisationally, thereby further strengthening the basis for excellent multicentre research. The clear goal is to improve patient care in the long term based on evidence.
And when she's not networking, she swaps meetings for running shoes or a racing bike and works on the perfect grind for her coffee instead of complex infrastructure. Because research and espresso extraction have one thing in common: in the end, it's the quality that counts.
Meike Theis has been a site computer scientist at the Academic Medical Centre Bonn since mid-2023 and recently became the spokesperson for the site computer scientists - a role that allows her to immerse herself even more deeply in the RACOON network. She enjoys working closely with the coordination team and technical partners. Her current focus is on the RACOON-DOSE sub-project, in which she is investigating how individual examination conditions and patient characteristics - such as body type or positioning during the examination - influence the radiation dose during CT examinations. The aim is to sustainably increase the efficiency of the legally prescribed dose monitoring and at the same time enable research with meaningful results.
She is particularly motivated by the interdisciplinary exchange within the network: "For Maike, a strong network is the essential basis for the agile and successful implementation of radiological studies with clinical relevance. As part of the RACOON community, she drives the further development of the digital infrastructure and thus contributes to making radiological research fit for the future.
After work, she swaps her screen for gardening shoes or a good book. Between her beds and her new flock of chickens, she finds the perfect balance to the world of data and algorithms.
Dr Bianca Lassen-Schmidt is project manager for RACOON at the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Medicine MEVIS - and has been from the very beginning: Since phase 0, she has been supporting the network with great professional expertise and personal commitment. Her research focus is on lung image analysis, which is why she joined RACOON with full conviction in 2020, when COVID-19 was the focus of the NUM. She studied computer science in Bremen and completed her doctorate in medical image analysis in Nijmegen. Today, she is also a member of the board of the Information Technology Working Group of the German Radiological Society, where she is driving forward the digital development of radiology. What she particularly appreciates about RACOON is the connection between academic medical centres and therefore bright minds who are as enthusiastic about research as she is. For her, the network pools energy, brings together different perspectives and transforms ideas into concrete projects. It is precisely this interdisciplinary collaboration with committed people that inspires her in her work.
She also keeps moving outside of research: she loves improv theatre and yoga and has set herself the annual challenge of learning how to do a handstand. And anyone who talks to her on the phone can rest assured: The conversation often takes place while she is out and about on her walking pad.
Since the second funding phase, Univ.-Prof. Dr med. Dipl. journ. Diane Renz has been actively involved in RACOON since the second funding phase, playing a key role in shaping the work of the NUM. As head of the paediatric radiology department at Hannover Medical School (MHH), she contributes her expertise to numerous projects: She was initially involved in the RACOON-COMBINE project before taking over the management of the multi-centre RACOON-RESCUE as one of the two Principal Investigators (PIs). This project created the first multimodal dataset of paediatric patients with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL) in collaboration with the NHL-BFM registry (Berlin-Frankfurt-Münster) and 28 NUM sites - an important milestone for research in this area. This success is now being continued with RACOON-INCLUDED: Prof Renz is once again taking on the role of PI. Together with the ALL-BFM study group, pulmonary complications and bone damage are being investigated as undesirable side effects of therapy in children with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia.
She is supported by Dr Ann-Katrin Heymann, who has been responsible for study coordination and project management at the MHH since RACOON-RESCUE and is also responsible for communication with the sites and organisational processes at RACOON-INCLUDED.
For Prof Renz and her team, RACOON-INCLUDED marks another important step within the joint research activities in the NUM and RACOON network. Everyone involved is looking forward to exciting results and lively collaboration with the sites.