Mitko Aleksandrov starts as InChangE postdoc

As part of his postdoc within the collaborative research association InChangE, Dr Mitko Aleksandrov investigates how individuals experience and understand 3D environments. His primary goal is to assess the impact of various factors, such as urbanisation level, weather, familiarity, distractions or level of detail, on people’s orientation, route choice and perception while navigating in indoor and outdoor spaces.

Previously, Aleksandrov completed his PhD at the University of Melbourne, where he investigated individual decision-making during evacuations of tall buildings, emphasising the impact of floor level, route options, crowdedness and instructions on these decisions. Following his PhD, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of New South Wales, focusing on strategies to effectively orient and navigate individuals in 3D environments.

Carolin Mezes joins InChangE as Individualisation Fellow

As Individualisation Fellow within the collaborative research association InChangE, Dr Carolin Mezes works on a sociological research project on psychosomatics. Psychosomatic medicine, a medical specialty firmly integrated in the German health system, is an older and a different form of todays individualised medicine and regards individualisation processes of disease and healing in a bio-psycho-social framework. Investigating the contemporary psychosomatic discourse from the perspective of sociology of science, Mezes’ research investigates how different actors understand the relation of the suffering individual to its environment, how they conceive disease symptoms as a product of this relationship and as a response to it, and which therapeutic interventions are supposed to help individuals accordingly.

Before joining InChangE, Mezes completed her doctorate at Marburg University’s Working Group on Political Sociology as part of the interdisciplinary Transregional Collaborative Research Centre 'Dynamics of Security' (CRC-TRR 138). In her research, she investigated the knowledge practice of pandemic preparedness monitoring with ethnographical research, documenting the contradictions of preparedness governance that became apparent in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Narcissistic personality traits are related to poorer response to psychotherapeutic treatment. This is the result of a German multi-site study with more than 2,000 participants receiving inpatient and outpatient psychotherapy. The findings of the research team at Jena University Hospital and University of Münster involving members of the JICE, now published in the scientific journal The Lancet Psychiatry, can contribute to further individualization of psychotherapy.

Joint press release by the Universities of Jena and Münster
Interview about the study in the podcast The Lancet Psychiatry in conversation with...
Original Publication

World Congress on Behavioural Science at Bielefeld University

The focus of the world’s largest conference on behavioural research, due to take place in a few days from 14 to 20 August at Bielefeld University, is on animal behaviour – its changes and backgrounds. Over 800 registered participants, including top academics from a broad spectrum of fields – from ethology to behavioural genetics to anthropology – will share their research and areas of expertise at Behaviour 2023. The multidisciplinary and international congress is the biennial main conference of the International Council of Ethologists (IEC).

Article by Bielefeld University
Conference website

Whether it is polar bears in the Arctic, gorillas in Uganda, or sea lions in the Galápagos, Professor Oliver Krüger undertakes expeditions to faraway locales to observe animals deep in the wild. As a behaviour researcher at Bielefeld University, Professor Krüger seeks to understand how different animal species adapt to shifts in the environment and climate change. One thing he never leaves home without: his camera, to capture those extraordinary encounters.

Article by Bielefeld University

Individualisation Fellowship: Liliya Doronina joins InChangE

During her Individualisation Fellowship within the collaborative research association InChangE, Dr Liliya Doronina investigates the ecological and genetic basis of changes in social structure, mating system and personality traits in island Arctic foxes. She analyses demographic and genetic data collected during long-term individual-based research of a small wild population of Arctic foxes isolated on an island in the North Pacific for a hundred thousand years.

Previously, Doronina completed her doctorate degree and worked as a postdoc at the Institute of Experimental Pathology of the Center for Molecular Biology of Inflammation at the University of Münster. She used transposable elements to disentangle evolutionary relationships in several mammalian groups. At the same time, she took part in the project "Research on ecology and behavior of the island arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus semenovi) on Mednyi Island (Commander Islands) in the North Pacific".

Nadine Mooren joins InChangE as Individualisation Fellow

As part of her Individualisation Fellowship, Dr Nadine Mooren addresses the topic of individualisation of human life in old age. She investigates the ways in which processes of individualisation are important for understanding human ageing. Additionally, she explores whether and how it is necessary to take into account the diversity of career paths, lifestyles, personal abilities, attitudes and values, also with regard to institutional arrangements.

Before joining InChangE, Mooren researched and taught at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Münster. In the field of Practical Philosophy and Ethics, she dealt with the relationship of anthropology and ethics, the characteristics of human life phases and the question of what differences between childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age imply for theories of the good life.

Niclas Kuper starts as Individualisation Fellow

As a new Individualisation Fellow, Dr Niclas Kuper focuses on understanding the interplay between persons and their contexts and environments – with respect to momentary person-situation dynamics, long-term outcomes and development as well as the broader socio-cultural context in which people are embedded. In his research, he uses various research designs (e.g., ambulatory assessment, online studies, longitudinal studies and laboratory studies) and statistical approaches (e.g., multilevel modeling, meta-analysis, psychometrics and simulation studies). He actively pursues the integration of multiple relevant perspectives from different disciplines and subdisciplines.

Before joining the InChangE, Kuper completed his doctorate degree at the Department of Psychology at Bielefeld University. He worked on dynamic approaches to personality, with a focus on person-situation interactions. Throughout this work, he observed considerable individual differences in the reaction to various situations. With these findings, his research highlights the relevance of person-situation interactions for comprehensive accounts of personality.

InChangE Postdoc Meeting

On Tuesday, 20 June 2023, postdocs and Individualisation Fellows met together with further members of the collaborative project InChangE at "Haus Heuer" in Beelen to present their current research. The participants took the opportunity to extensively exchange about their projects and further future collaborations across the involved disciplines.

InChangE Postdoc Meetings

The Bielefeld behavioral scientist Prof Dr Joseph Hoffman was involved in a large-scale study with data on Antarctic fur seals. In a comparative analysis of pedigree-based mutation rates, far-reaching insights into the evolution of mutations in vertebrates could be gained. Individualization enables animal species to better adapt to their environment, which is changing due to climate change, for example. Mutations can also play a role in this. In the interview, Prof Hoffman explains which animals were studied, why knowledge of germline mutation rates is so relevant, and why the time between generations is a factor that should not be underestimated regarding hereditary diseases.

Article by Bielefeld University

InChangE offers two Individualisation Fellowships for postdocs

In the colloborative project "Individualisation in Changing Environments" (InChangE) funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the state of NRW, the Universities of Münster and Bielefeld are exploring the causes, mechanisms and effects of individualisation in changing environments in an interdisciplinary discourse between natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities. The disciplines represented in the joint project are biology, philosophy, sociology, economics, psychology, geoinformatics, psychiatry and health sciences.

To promote excellent academics who are at the beginning of their independent research career, Bielefeld University offers two Individualisation Fellowships for early career researchers. These positions will offer the successful candidates the opportunity to further develop their independent research in the field of interdisciplinary individualisation science and to prepare their application for an individual research grant.

More details

New InChangE member: Jana Seep starts as postdoc

Dr Jana Seep is the newest member of the InChangE research network as a postdoc. She is working on the analysis of semantically annotated trajectories - which combine geometric data with the surrounding context and describe the movements of persons or animals. In her project, she will investigate to what extent the semantic contexts can be used to determine direct causal relationships with the movement decisions made. By doing so, she hopes to better model and understand the movement and orientation of individuals in their environment.

Before joining InChangE, Seep did her doctorate at the Computer Science Department at the University of Münster. She focused on the analysis of semantically annotated motion data and adapted an approach from reverse engineering to model it. In this way, she was able to gain initial insights into possible correlations in the data and use them to calculate both representative behaviour of groups and the groups themselves, taking into account all known environmental influences.

Julia Rötzmeier-Keuper joins InChangE as postdoc

Dr Julia Rötzmeier-Keuper joined the collaborative research association InChangE as a postdoc in April 2023. In her project, she will empirically investigate cooperative and selfish behaviour and explore how this affects the sustainability of individual consumption as well as the potential use of technological developments to shape more sustainable consumption activities.

Rötzmeier-Keuper completed her doctorate in economics at the University of Paderborn in the field of service management. She investigated vulnerable market participants and marginalised consumer groups as well as the role of digital technologies in reducing or avoiding potential vulnerabilities in the market. Before joining InChangE, Rötzmeier-Keuper worked as a postdoc at TU Berlin in the DFG project "DigiSales", in which she investigated the influencing factors and consequences of technostress in digitalised sales work.

Individualisation is the topic addressed by researchers from the natural sciences, humanities and social sciences at the Joint Institute for Individualisation in a Changing Environment (JICE). Every year in April, the JICE, which is supported by the Universities of Münster and Bielefeld, the collaborative research association InChangE and the SFB-TRR 212 jointly organise the interdisciplinary Individualisation Symposium at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at Bielefeld University. The event focuses on interdisciplinary discourse on individualisation in changing environments as well as and on promoting the collaboration between the research associations. In an interview, the two JICE researchers, Angela Schwering, Professor for Geoinformatics at the University of Münster, and Meike Wittmann, Junior Professor for Theoretical Biology at Bielefeld University, talk about their recent experiences in the research association.

 Article by Bielefeld University [de]

Genes or the environment: which has a stronger effect on the development of an individual? A study by behavioural ecologists suggests that the question needs to be asked differently: at what points in life do genes have a stronger influence on the individual, and when the environment? In the new episode of research_tv, they report their conclusions.

The study is part of the Bielefeld research on individualisation in changing environments. Bielefeld University is cooperating on this topic with the University of Münster – in the JICE, the collaborative research association InChangE funded by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, and the Transregional Collaborative Research Centre NC³ (CRC-TRR 212) funded by the German Research Foundation DFG.

Episode of research_tv by Bielefeld University