It’s been a while since we published the last interview in our COVID-19 interview series. We always had planned to publish a short recap post after the series is terminated and – better late than never – here it is! In addition we will also give a short outlook about what is going to happen next here on this blog.

First we present you a short summary of the 2021 COVID-19 Leibniz postdocs interview series: in total we featured 14 postdocs from twelve Leibniz-Institutes in twelve interviews on our blog between May and December 2021. Additionally, we published the initial call in February 2021 and an introductory post when we started the series. Links to each single interview are provided below. For a summary, also have a look at the bar diagrams below. There you can see, based on results from the last Leibniz Postdoc Survey, that Section E (Environmental Sciences) was highly over-represented. On the other hand, section D (Mathematics, Natural Sciences, Engineering) was severely underrepresented with zero contributions (Figure 1a). We can only speculate why this happened, maybe it could be partially explained with fewer topics that are directly related to the pandemic. The representation of the remaining three Leibniz sections in the interview series was fairly similar to their share of overall postdocs at Leibniz (Figure 1a).

A second category we can look at is the nationality of the postdocs that were featured in the blog series: Eight of the 14 interview partners were researchers from Germany while the other six have represented the rest of the world (Figure 1b). This reflects the overall relationship as revealed through the survey very well where international postdocs were only slightly over-represented.

We conclude with the “winners” who received the highest single page views per individual blog post:

• 1st place: Stress resilience during the pandemic with Dr. Sarah Ayash from LIR (interview #9)
• 2nd place: How SARS-CoV-2 spreads through the air with Dr. Ajit Ahlawat from TROPOS (interview #3)
• 3rd place: The Digitalization of Working Worlds with Dr. Alice Melchior from GESIS (interview #1)

While we (Christian and Gregor) did most of the organizing and editing work for the series we want to also express our sincere gratitude towards all the people who supported us: Johanna and Felix for technical support, Marta for support with questionnaire design, the entire steering committee for help with proof reading and copy-editing, Marvin Bähr from Leibniz headquarters, and, of course, all participants who took the time to answer our questions. Thank you!

If you wonder now if there will be a sequel to our series: Yes, we are in the midst of planning and we will publish a new call in the next couple of weeks. The new call will also come in tandem with another interview which we won’t give you more details at the moment. Stay tuned for more 🙂

Yours

Christian Nehls & Gregor Kalinkat

PS: Here are the links to all other interviews:

• #2: The immune response in severe COVID-19 cases with Dr. Marta Ferreira-Gomes from DRFZ
• #4: Coping strategies of families during the COVID-19 pandemic with Drs. Andrea Schmidt, Andreas Neubauer and Friederike Blume from DIPF
• #5: How COVID-19 affects sustainable transformation with Dr. Prajal Pradhan from PIK
• #6: Health and wellbeing of university students during the COVID-19 pandemic with Dr. Heide Busse from BIPS
• #7: Investigating the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on higher education across borders with Dr. Jana Kleibert from IRS
• #8: How does a pandemic lockdown affect light pollution? with Dr. Andreas Jechow from IGB
• #10: The intricacies of anthropological field work during a pandemic with Dr. Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa from ZMT
• #11: International cooperation in the time of pandemic with Dr. Scarlett Sett from DMSZ
• #12: Multiple burdens: rheumatic diseases during a pandemic with Dr. Martin Schäfer from DRFZ