„We vs. Virus“: This was the motto of the German government’s call for a hackathon in March 2020 to initiate digital projects to tackle the Corona crisis. In this digital participation process, more than 28,000 people developed over 1,500 creative solutions to deal with the challenges of the pandemic. Francesco Reina, Alex Seltmann, and John Wigg from Christian Eggeling’s research department were among them. Within 48 hours, they and their team set up the interactive web app #SimThinkAct. It simulates the extent to which one’s own behavior contributes to spreading the virus.

In the local „Jena vs. Virus“ issue, René Lachmann and Benedict Diederich from Rainer Heintzmann’s research department also came up with a resourceful idea. They developed a program with which students in „Stay Home“ times can also control their experiments under the microscope from their home computers. To do this, they used their UC2 optical toolbox.