Principal investigator

Dorothee Volkert, PhD, holds the Professorship of Clinical Nutrition in Older People at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Institute for Biomedicine of Aging in Nuremberg, Germany, since 2009. She is a nutrition scientist and received her Ph.D. from the Geriatric Hospital Bethanien, University of Heidelberg and University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart in 1991. In 2001 she became Associate Professor at the Department of Nutrition Science, University of Bonn, and from 2005-2009 she was Head of the Department for Scientific Information in the Medical Nutrition Industry.

Her research is focused on nutritional problems of older persons in all health care settings and related interventions. She served as coordinator and first-author of the “ESPEN Guidelines for Clinical Nutrition and Hydration in Geriatrics” and was/is involved in leading positions in several national and international research projects (e.g. enable, MaNuEL, nutritionDay in nursing homes). In APPETITE she serves as project coordinator.

PhD student

Pia Scheufele received her master's degree in molecular nutritional science from the University of Vienna in 2021. During her studies, she gained experience with human studies and clinical nutrition and participated in research projects on dietary behaviour, immunology and nutritional medicine. She has worked with severely obese patients and conducted research on nutritional therapy after bariatric surgery. In April 2021, she started a PhD in human biology at the Institute of Biomedicine of Aging. As part of the APPETITE project, she is working on secondary data analysis to characterize older people with poor appetite (WP1) and will manage the German study centre at FAU (WP4).