Last Wednesday, March 10, it was announced that the Ruhr-Universität has prevailed in a multi-stage and very competitive application process: The network "LIFE TBT" directed by Prof. Dr. Silvia Schneider from the Research and Treatment Center for Mental Health of the RUB, will become one of six locations of the German Center for Mental Health (GCMH) throughout Germany. The goal of the center is to improve combating common diseases and to bring research results more quickly into practice.
One of the center's focal points lies on privacy and security. HGI members Malte Elson (Psychology of Human Technology Interaction group) and Jörg Schwenk (Chair for Network and Data Security) will work at the interface between large data sets in clinical research, open science and the preservation of security and privacy. On the one hand, it is about the security of data that is generated and has to be managed in large quantities at the GCMH, for example in the form of patient data from therapies. On the other hand, the research of the GCMH should be made transparent and should offer possibilities for data use and analysis without violating the privacy of patients*. Malte Elson and Jörg Schwenk will develop and establish the necessary infrastructure for this purpose, which can then also benefit other GCMH sites and other institutions.
The funding phase of the German Center for Mental Health will begin in 2022.
General note: In case of using gender-assigning attributes we include all those who consider themselves in this gender regardless of their own biological sex.