Launching VALUE-VACC
“Your project must be in full swing by now!”, a colleague recently asked – barely six months into this six-year project. This calls for a first brief VALUE-VACC update.
As of February 2023, a team of two postdocs (Anna Pichelstorfer and Dmitrii Zhikarevich) and a PhD student (Nora Hansl) form the VALUE-VACC team, along with PI Katharina Paul. Coming from different disciplines (political science, STS, and economic sociology), we are thoroughly enjoying getting to know each other’s work and ways of thinking about the world (of vaccination).
We formally kicked off the project last month with our collaborators of the Oxford Vaccine Group with the brilliant Sam Vanderslott who heads the Vaccines & Society Group there. We spent two days discussing each other’s work and developing ideas for joint work, including publications and conference panels as well as joint workshops in Vienna and Oxford, including digital health expert Sam Martin and Charlie Firth who helped us think about community engagement and communication. We were also lucky to have our fantastic colleague Christian Haddad at the workshop – his talk on antibiotics and innovation governance was truly inspiring! Watch this space for updates and forthcoming events!
Finally, we also just received ethics approval from the University of Vienna research ethics commission and are now beginning to adjust our sampling strategy and preparing for recruitment of interview partners. So VALUE-VACC seems to be in full swing indeed and we are all very excited about this next phase!

Photographer: Sam Vanderslott