Ifado

The Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors (IfADo) investigates potentials and risks of modern work on the basis of behavioral and life sciences. The results lead to principles of beneficial and healthy design of the working environment. The IfADo research deals with the working human. Its goal is the health- and performance promoting design of working environment and working tasks. This, in the broadest sense, is the affinity of the IfADo to other ergonomic research centers. The relevant processes and functions are investigated on different levels? from a cellular through to a behavioral or state of health level. This is the relation of the IfADo to other research centers for behavioral and life science. The interdisciplinary connection between problems in the work sphere on the one hand, and scientific theories and methods on the other hand, is a distinct feature of the IfADo research. For reaching this goal - and compliant to the demands of a modern working environment - core competences in the disciplines ergonomics, occupational medicine, toxicology, and psychology are at hand. Contrary to institutes that concentrate on occupational research, solutions for practical problems are not only addressed by observing the coherences of working environment, working task and their optimization, but by the evaluation of causal coherences established on the basis of basic scientific research. Such an approach in particular allows the extrapolations on not yet studied or not even existing working environments.