Collaborating with the surrounding communities of researchers, practitioners, and educators is very important. I sincerely believe that engaging in academia-industry collaborations, in research communities, and in public outreach activities going beyond traditional lecture halls or rather isolated research project settings are imperative for making not only a scientific impact, but also to yield results with a high industrial and social impact.

Academia-Industry Collaborations – The RE.collab network

I have been privileged to work in close collaboration with the industry for many years. The insights gained through these collaborations support achieving a balance between theoretical impact of our work and solving practically relevant problems, and it also creates an environment that allows us to continuously evaluate and disseminate contemporary and future research in practice. In principle, I consider academia-industry collaborations as very rewarding for both industry partners and academic partners. 

My past and ongoing collaborations have allowed me to establish a network of trusted collaborators from practice and I have decided to start making this network of collaborators on topics related to Requirements Engineering explicit via the RE.collab network. RE.collab forms an informal alliance of industry partners from various backgrounds, sectors, and domains, all working on Requirements Engineering in their daily project environments. The alliance shall foster the continuous exchange and research-centric projects between its members and with the empiRE research group.

Members of the RE.collab network [1] are informed regularly via our mailing list on

  • (free) Seminars, workshops, round tables, or other exchange and networking formats we organise to discuss RE-related issues with members of the group and of other companies
  • Information on the State of Requirements Engineering, contemporary research results, and future research perspectives with the aim of improving RE practices
  • Perspectives on planned collaborations and externally funded research projects to which they are cordially invited
  • Carefully selected ongoing research-centric studies where they are invited to participate and make their voices heard (e.g. industry surveys or interviews by the research group)
  • Possibilities for reaching out to students via joint teaching activities (e.g. thesis supervisions or laboratory courses)

If you are an industry practitioner working in RE and would like to know more, please fill out our short survey!

___
[1] Membership is informal, free, and comes with no obligations. The mailing list is further not made public, members remain anonymous except for when partners participate in public events, and members can further withdraw from the list at any time.

Research Collaborations and Public Outreach

I am actively involved in two major software engineering research communities, namely the

  • Empirical Software Engineering community, and the
  • Requirements Engineering community

while constantly opting for interesting collaborations going also beyond those areas. In both communities,  I serve via various activities and roles, including the ISERN network or IREB, where we collaborate on investigating and improving the practical relevance of research contributions and educational material for practitioners. Public outreach is further of particular interest to me. Here, I co-founded Pint of Science Germany e.V., a non-profit society dedicated at bringing scientists of different disciplines to local bars to share their latest insights and scientific breakthroughs with the general public. The complete list of ongoing and past collaborations as well as my engagement in the international research communities can be taken from by professional activities.

If you are a researcher and interested in collaborating, please simply reach out to me!