Where does jet lag come from?
Since then the two of them have shared an office at the TUM Garching campus in the Professorship for Applied Mathematics in Ecology and Medicine. Here the two are investigating the jet lag syndrome, a topic which Franz Aschl has been working on for quite some time already. "In my Master's thesis I wanted to find the connection between the severity of the jet lag and the time difference on the one hand and the traveler's sleep rhythm on the other," says Franz Aschl.
At the time he had been working with an existing mathematical model that took into account how the traveler's internal clock was impacted by the time difference. The model was developed in the 1990's by bioinformatics researchers and is based on experimental data from sleep laboratories. "The we applied the model to jet lag syndrome," says Aschl. To do so, he compared the data from the model with symptoms reported by the test subjects. A correlation soon emerged. "Then I 'fed' the model with data on jet lag, which worked very well. And at that point the statistical analysis of the result became interesting," Aschl recalls. "Since I don't have a particularly strong background in statistics, that was a real challenge," he adds.
Then the TUM.Africa Talent Program entered the equation with exactly the right timing, he says. The two doctoral thesis advisors – Prof. Atinuke Adebanji of KNUST and Prof. Johannes Müller of TUM – had already been in contact and now had the idea of bringing the two candidates together.
