Team

In 2013 Christine founded Mertzlufft Linguistic Consultancy with the goal of providing the pharma and healthcare industry with high-quality linguistic analysis and language strategy consultancy for the German markets. She produces actionable insights for marketing and market research teams of top pharmaceutical companies by combining qualitative and quantitative research methodologies. Her consulting activity comprises the optimization of market strategies and products with a special focus on their customers – patients, physicians and caregivers – and their needs. Christine’s profound subject matter expertise covers a variety of disease states including MS, RA, Epilepsy, COPD, Asthma, Diabetes, NASH, and macular oedema. In addition, she is active in scientific research on patient-physician communication. In an upcoming research project with the Medical Center of the University of Freiburg she will investigate the impact of a new training method on GPs’ communication skills. 

Christine Mertzlufft has over 20 years of experience in the linguistic analysis of spoken and written language data for academic and non-academic purposes alike. She is a bilingual German-Swedish linguist holding a PhD in German linguistics from the University of Freiburg. After her Master thesis in Scandinavian languages and German linguistics, she continued with research at the German department of the University of Freiburg working as a research assistant from 2004 until 2013. Her research covered a variety of linguistic subfields, such as sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, and text analysis. She published several scientific monographs, anthologies, and papers, including a contribution to a seminal paper that nowadays sets the standard for transcribing spoken language data within the field of conversation analysis in Germany. In her PhD thesis she examined comprehensibility and aspects of formality in texts from German and Swedish authorities. Her PhD research and post doc research was funded by several institutions, amongst others the Swedish Academy. Christine was a visiting scholar at universities in Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Russia.

Joachim Peters works as an associate medical linguist since 2020 and research assistant at the University of Erlangen since 2017. Joachim is interested in the structure of medical discourses, as well as emotionality and framing in medical texts, but exploring the semantics and connotation of metaphors is his particular passion. He has been researching topics from medical linguistics (Metaphor in medicine, framing and frame semantics, conversation analysis, data mining, empirical corpus analysis) since 2014, starting with his master’s thesis. In his PhD thesis, he models discourses in medical texts, using quantitative analysis methods, such as topic modelling based on keyword calculations and statistical collocations. In addition to several third-party funding and research grants (German National Academic Foundation, Hanns Seidel Foundation, DAAD Comenius Program, DAAD Go East Fellowship), he was involved in an institute partnership with the Brazilian universities of Porto Alegre and Pelotas in 2015 and 2018. Joachim has carried out research with scientists from the Universities of Lancaster, Münster, Munich and Berkeley and the Robert Bosch Institute for the History of Medicine and has completed internships in Stavanger, Munich, London, Lancaster, and Cambridge. Since his internship in Lancaster, he has specialized in the British approach to empirical corpus linguistics and metaphor research.

Joachim’s CV combines linguistic expertise and profound medical background knowledge, both essential for competent consulting in the fields of medical and pharmaceutical language.