Postdoc Appreciation Week: Q&A with Virginie Kreutzinger and Katharina Ziegeler
As part of our celebration of Postdoc Appreciation Week, we invited two postdocs, Virginie Kreutzinger, MD, and Katharina Ziegeler, MD, to answer a few questions about their work and their time at UCSF.
Ziegeler and Kreutzinger both came to us from the same university in Berlin, and now work with both Sharmila Majumdar, PhD, and Thomas Link, MD, PhD. Kreutzinger researches both osteoarthritis and the spine while Ziegeler is working on inflammatory diseases.
Virginie Kreutzinger, MD
Q: What is your favorite aspect of doing research at UCSF?
I value the collaborative, interdisciplinary environment. There's also a genuine appreciation for everyone who works here at UCSF, making me feel welcome and also provides an atmosphere to build lasting friendships!
Q: Tell us about your research.
I have been working on imaging phenotypes in osteoarthritis and how they differ between men and women. This work is geared towards better selection of patients for clinical trials in osteoarthritis. Additionally, I am working on functional FDG-PET imaging in nerve-compressions in the spine.
Q: What impact do you envision your research having on patient care?
I hope my work on differences in imaging between men and women can make a small contribution to a better awareness of these differences in both research and clinical practice. Many of us are still not considering the differences between men and women in enough depth, from pain processing to anatomical differences, and I hope to make a contribution by raising awareness.
Katharina Ziegeler, MD
Q: What is your favorite aspect of doing research at UCSF?
I very much enjoy the interprofessional and international research environment here! The multitude of different backgrounds, both academic and cultural, that team members bring to the table makes for fascinating research and great lunch conversations.
Q: Tell us about your research.
I am a clinical radiologist from Berlin, Germany working in MSK imaging, with a special research interest in arthritis. I have done a lot of research on inflammatory disease of joints and spine and am happy apply and extend my skills with the great resources here at UCSF. I am working on different projects ranging from large language models for data extraction from radiology reports to the influence body composition on outcomes of osteoarthritis.
Q: What is it like for postdocs to work with two faculty sponsors?
It gives me an interesting double perspective on many of the projects I am involved with. While my work with Thomas Link is geared more towards classical clinical radiological research, tying imaging findings to patient outcomes in osteoarthritis, my work with Sharmila Majumdar has a much more technical focus. I have been lucky enough to work with a diverse group of scientists and learn more about the engineering aspects of artificial intelligence in imaging, which I greatly appreciate. Working with different sponsors may seem challenging at first, but I have experienced it mainly as enriching, as ideas from one group can translate into projects in another group, which I feel is the essence of international research.