The German Research Foundation (DFG) announced that Fabian Theis is a winner of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz prize. It is endowed with 2.5 million Euros. Fabian Theis is Principal Investigator of the German Center for Lung Research (DZL) and a leading pioneer in the fields of machine learning in biomedicine and computational health research. He is Head of the Computational Health Center at Helmholtz Munich and chair for Mathematical Modelling of Biological Systems at the Technical University of Munich (TUM).
He is a key player in the Human Cell Atlas, an international collaborative project with the goal of establishing a reference database of all human cells as a basis for the diagnosis, monitoring and therapy of diseases. Further intensive biological investigations of human lung cells are a cooperation with Herbert Schiller, DZL-PI and group leader at the Institute of Lung Health and Immunity (Helmholtz Munich). The aim is a complete mapping of all the cells in the lung within the "Human Cell Atlas"
Fabian Theis about his new award: “I am super excited and grateful about this recognition! The past years have seen a rapid explosion of single cell genomics. The produced big data makes this a fantastic area to explore with machine and deep learning techniques to understand cellular decisions in health and disease. What also stands out is the immensely collaborative research - with teams truly spanning the globe. The future of medicine is data-based, and I hope to contribute to the foundations of a transformative biomedical era.”
Read more about the project "Mapping of Lung Cells" of the two DZL-PIs Theis/Schiller here:
https://cpc-munich.de/en/research-projects/atlas-of-the-aging-lung.html
A detailed news about the Leibniz Prize 2023 for Fabian Theis can be found here:
https://www.helmholtz-munich.de/en/newsroom/news-all/artikel/fabian-theis-wins-leibniz-prize-2023