MICCAI 2022 Daily – Wednesday

25 DAILY MICCAI Wednesday In Heidelberg, in my medical school, the medical school program is kind of condensed. You already get one semester off for whatever you want. Most people use it for research. I thought I could just add another semester. I had like, two semesters off medical school. If one day you have to choose research or treating people's ailments, which one will you choose? I can only choose both. Because I'm a physician, I like helping people. I'm fascinated by what you can do for people! One of my ways of achieving that goal is really research. In our research, it's all a collaborative effort. It's all a team thing. We can really make a big impact. Research is my way of advancing this and of getting to that goal. How important is collaboration in what you do? It’s one of the most important things. The team can be motivating. The team gives different perspectives. I especially enjoy working in multidisciplinary teams. This is something that I learned during this thesis research time at medical school. I worked on a project at the intersection of pediatric oncology and medicinal chemistry. We had chemists working on that and also physicians and medical students, which are like me as a doctoral student. That was where I got into this interdisciplinary thinking and this understanding and communication. I really enjoyed it during that time already. Now that's one of the biggest points that I enjoy. I see it from multiple disciplines, with people with different backgrounds and different training, and different knowledge. This just advances our research. It's so fun for me to explain how it works in the medical field to my colleagues with an informatics background or a computer science background. On the other hand, I find it very fascinating to learn something from a completely different field. They teach me a bit of computer science, and I teach them a bit about surgery and medicine. Then we kind of fuse that and find synergy and make the best out of it. You are already doing a lot of things! Don't tell me that you also plan to teach! I love teaching, and I love supervising students. As I was Fiona Kolbinger Stephan Floss