Joshua Angrist, 2021 Nobel Laureate in Economics, hosted Marc Diederichs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge for a duration of three months. The research visit resulted in a still ongoing collaboration and Marc was allowed to attend coursework at MIT and gain insights into the US research culture.
Marc Diederichs and Reyn van Ewijk of the Chair of Statistics and Econometrics, together with their co-authors Ingo Isphording and Nico Pestel, were awarded the Science Award (“Wissenschaftspreis”) 2023 of the German Health Economics Association (DGGÖ). They received this prize for their paper “Schools under mandatory testing can mitigate the spread of SARS-CoV-2", which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
On June 6th 2025, Fabienne Pradella and Timo Münz attended GLOHRA Day, the Annual Symposium of the German Alliance for Global Health Research (GLOHRA) in Berlin. GLOHRA is a proponent for interdisciplinary and collaborative global health research. 200+ participants joined on site in Berlin, exchanging on research on policy topics relevant to global health research. The keynote by Ntobeko Ntusi, President and CEO of the South African Research Council, addressed “The changing face of global health in the context of receding global solidarity.”
Together with Melanie Böckmann (Bremen University), Fabienne moderated an interactive “Ask the Community” session on “Story telling for science-policy transfer in global health”. In October, they jointly organize a GLOHRA Training Offer on a similar topic: Story matters: an introduction to document analysis approaches and mixed methods data visualization.
Picture credit: Ralf Ruehmeier / GLOHRA
In awarding the Poster Award 2025, the VvE cited her visually attractive poster, enthusiastic presentation and the novel topic of her study on "Ramadan during pregnancy and offspring cognitive health: evidence from Muslims in the Netherlands."
At the annual WEON conference in Leiden, The Netherlands, the Netherlands Epidemiological Society (VvE) awarded Van Tran the Poster Award 2025 for her poster on "Ramadan during pregnancy and offspring cognitive health: evidence from Muslims in the Netherlands." According to the VvE: “Among the nominated visually attractive posters, the enthusiastic presentation and novel topic helped determine the winner.”
Here you find an interview with Reyn van Ewijk from our faculty’s interview series.
From January 16th to 17th, we hosted a workshop on systematic literature reviews and meta-analyses. The event attracted participants from various disciplines within the social sciences as well as the medical sciences. Distinguished speakers addressing systematic reviews featured Andranik Tumasjan and Christian Wilke from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. In the realm of meta-analyses, we were honored to have Eric Hedberg (Abt Associates) and Larry Hedges from Northwestern University as our guest speakers. Larry Hedges, in particular, stands out as one of the key figures shaping the contemporary field of meta-analysis.
Joel Schwartz, Professor of Environmental Epidemiology, and expert on causal inference in the field of environmental exposures, invited Fabienne to start a collaboration on prental environmental shocks and health outcomes among newborns. Fabienne attended numerous events on campus, exchanged with the vibrant academic community and enjoyed the Boston winter with her family, who accompanied her during the visit.
From 25 – 27 September 2024, we had the pleasure to invite 24 researchers to an interdisciplinary workshop on “Causal Methods in Early-Life Research” in Bad Kreuznach. Together with researchers from economics, epidemiology, medicine, and the social sciences, we explored the complexities of establishing causality in early-life research and methodological synergies across disciplines. The workshop featured sessions on stress in early life, nutrition in early life and growing up in a changing climate, as well as a keynote by Maya Rossin-Slater, Stanford University which focused on the role of public policy in the early-life environment and life course trajectories. Funding for this workshop was provided by the German Alliance for Global Health Research (GLOHRA) and the German Research Foundation (DFG).
The report is now available online.
Our article has now appeared online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Citation: Marc Diederichs, Reyn van Ewijk, Ingo Isphording, Nico Pestel (2022), Schools under mandatory testing can mitigate the spread of SARS-CoV-2, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(26) e2201724119, doi: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2201724119
Significance
We provide causal evidence on the impact of opening schools in a situation under virus variants and substantial vaccination rates in the adult population. We show that schools under regular and mandatory rapid testing of the studentship mitigated the growth in case numbers leading to Germany’s fourth pandemic wave in autumn 2021. Our results have important implications for the design of future nonpharmaceutical interventions to mitigate the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 and comparable future diseases. Keeping schools open under mandatory testing rules can provide a means to track infection rates. Our results suggest that school closures, given substantial economic and societal costs, should be thought of as the “last resort,” even if inevitable at some point.
Abstract
We use event study models based on staggered summer vacations in Germany to estimate the effect of school reopenings after the summer of 2021 on the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Estimations are based on daily counts of confirmed coronavirus infections across all 401 German counties. A central antipandemic measure in German schools included mandatory rapid testing multiple times per week. Our results are consistent with mandatory testing contributing to the containment of the viral spread. We find a short-term increase in infection rates right after summer breaks, indicating the uncovering of otherwise undetected (asymptomatic) cases through the testing. After a period of about 2 wk after school reopenings, the growth of case numbers is smaller in states that reopened schools compared with the control group of states still in summer break. The results show a similar pattern for older age groups as well, arguably as a result of detected clusters through the school testing. This means that under certain conditions, open schools can play a role in containing the spread of the virus. Our results suggest that closing schools as a means to reduce infections may have unintended consequences by giving up surveillance and should be considered only as a last resort.
For more details, see the full article here.
An earlier version appeared as an IZA working paper. It can be found here.
And for a German summary, see here.