Institution

Leipzig University, Germany

Heide studied psychology at the University of Leipzig and finished her PhD in Public Health at the Freie Universität, Berlin. She is a trained psychotherapist (Cognitive behavioural psychotherapy), and is currently the vice head of the Department of Medical Psychology and Medical Sociology (University of Leipzig), and the working group “Psychotraumatology and migration research”. 

 

Her main research focus is the epidemiology of mental disorders and particularly of traumatic experiences and PTSD in the elderly as long-term consequences of WWII. In 2012 she completed her habilitation at the Medical Faculty of Leipzig. Her habilitation was awarded with the “Gerd-Sommer-Award of Peace Psychology” in 2012. There she started to investigate the psychological consequences of growing up as a child born of war in the post-war period, in Germany. She initiated the first ever study about the topic in 2013. To develop the subjects empirical evidence she initiated comparable studies in Austria (working with Barbara-Stelzl Marx, Ludwig-Boltzmann-Institut für Kriegsfolgenforschung) and in Norway. 

 

Heide is a member of the International Network for Interdisciplinary Research on Children Born of War (INIRC) (www.childrenbornofwar.org), and has co-authored more than 180 scientific articles and book chapters. Her scientific work was awarded with the Falk-von-Reichenbach-Award in 2014.