Patexia would like to congratulate Dr. Eva Künnemann on her successful contributions as a Patexia Researcher. Dr. Künnemann became a Patexia member in August 2014 and was the recent winner of our Bio-Inspired Design contest with a very creative submission.

We interviewed Dr. Künnemann about her Patexia experience, and here is what she had to say:

1. What is your background/area of expertise?

After school, I studied biology and wrote a master thesis in genetics. Then I did a PhD in molecular biology and continued further working for some years with protein biochemistry. Therefore, I have a deep background in natural sciences. That background served as the basis when I started a job consisting mainly of professional database searches on literature and patents. Although I worked in between for a publishing house and as a freelancer this was the start for my part-time work now as search specialist at a small company called InfoLit Infobroker GmbH in Zürich, Switzerland.

2. Do you have a research tip for the community?

First, always try to formulate the search task very exactly. Then, in a second step, you have to think about where to search. In the third step, it is important to find the right search terms and to combine them to the appropriate syntax.

In general, I like to start with a broad search to get all relevant hits. Only if it is too many results to go through one by one, I try to narrow down with another concept, or two.

3. What is the most interesting search result you have found?

An interesting search result is often an unexpected one, for example if you find many results, where you expect only a few. When you find few, where you expect many, it is worthwhile changing the search terms or the strategy, maybe you just missed a lot.

Once, I looked for a long time for the full-text of a publication from before 1950 from a veterinary on the sheep disease scrapie. I did not find it and almost forgot about it, when a colleague gave it to me. When I read it about 50 years after its publication, I was astonished about the observations and interpretations made with the means from that time.

4. Is there a key event, change, or insight that you think will be critical for the future of IP or your field that other Patexia members should know about?

With intellectual property I have learned that the whole industry is always in flux. For example, the rights to prevent others from selling a certain product only exists for a certain time. Additionally, these rights will depend on the country. Other people can offend and attack the given rights. Even the laws IP is based upon can change.

We would like to thank Dr. Künnemann for her contributions to the community, and we look forward to working with her in the future.

Keep an eye out for our Featured Expert next month!