In this role my responsibilities include: • overall strategic and operational responsibility for the IMM with its four departments (two basic science departments and two ‚clinical translational departments’), each headed by a full professor, • overall responsibility for the institutional budget (about 5 Mio Euro per year) and for about 100 employees, • direct management including oversight of the projects of the Department of Molecular Medicine with its four working groups (Synovial Pathology, Osteoimmunology, Cartilage Biology and Bone Cancer)

In this secondary appointment as a Senior Director and consultant I supported the early drug development process, mainly by: • contributing to the development and implementation of innovative and coherent research and discovery strategies for the TA as well as to specific research projects in this field by providing scientific input as well as by mentoring, coaching and developing talents. • connecting to other parts of early solutions and bridging with the late stage and commercial organization to design and accelerate translational approaches by including early clinical and commercial strategies into preclinical development • promote and contribute to external partnering by helping assess external opportunities and setting up external collaborations to access cutting edge science and accelerate in-house development

As Clinical Resident in Internal Medicine and Rheumatology and Head of an ‘Emmy-Noether’ Research Group (funded by the German Research Foundation, DFG) I was leading an independent research group with a focus on - mesenchymal activation and transformation in chronic inflammatory disorders, particularly rheumatoid arthritis.- cartilage remodeling in osteoarthritis

As a DFG- funded Research Fellow and later Senior Research Fellow I worked at the Center for Experimental Rheumatology, University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland and focus on fibroblast biology in rheumatic disorders.