Anja Strangfeld is the new head of the Epidemiology program area at the DRFZ
17.03.2022 14:55
On March 1, 2022, Anja Strangfeld was appointed to the professorship of “Epidemiology and Health Services Research”. The professorship is jointly supported by the Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the German Rheumatism Research Center Berlin (DRFZ), a Leibniz Institute. At the same time, Prof. Dr. med. Strangfeld will head the Epidemiology and Health Services Research program area at the DRFZ, succeeding Prof. Angela Zink.
Anja Strangfeld is a doctor and has dedicated her professional focus to rheumatism epidemiology. During her doctoral thesis at the DRFZ, she was already concerned with the outpatient care of patients with rheumatoid arthritis. She then worked as a doctor in the Department of Rheumatology and Clinical Immunology at the Charité Berlin under the direction of Professor Burmester and began her research as a postdoc in Angela Zink's group. In 2010 she took over the management of the pharmacoepidemiology group at the DRFZ. Since then, she has been investigating the safety of therapies and, through her research, has made a decisive contribution to improving the care of patients with rheumatic diseases in Germany. Since March 1, 2022, Anja Strangfeld has headed the entire epidemiology and health services research program at the DRFZ:
“With the extremely competent and very committed and motivated team in the Epidemiology program area behind me, I am looking forward to the future. We are looking forward to a new era of documentation and care - towards more digitization, use of new media and tools. I would like to further develop and strengthen our national and international networks in the scientific area, but also expand our links with rheumatological institutions. “In addition, we would like to intensify interdisciplinary collaboration with the basic science groups and strengthen the integration of the perspectives of those affected into our research,” says Prof. Strangfeld, looking to the future.
Among other things, the epidemiologist helped set up the RABBIT (Rheumatoid Arthritis: Observation of Biological Therapy) biological register, in which the disease progression of more than 20,000 patients with rheumatoid arthritis under conventional or new therapies has been observed since 2001. Around 450 institutions have already been recruited to take part in this register. Some of the published results are now part of basic rheumatological knowledge. The RABBIT-SpA registry for patients with axial spondyloarthritis and psoriatic arthritis was launched five years ago and the Rhekiss pregnancy registry was launched seven years ago. Right at the beginning of the corona pandemic, her research group actively participated in setting up the German and European COVID-19 registers for rheumatic patients, from which important findings emerged about the special situation of these patients during the pandemic.