We congratulate Professor Dr. Katarzyna (Kasia) Bozek, member at the Center for Molecular Medicine Cologne (CMMC), on the informative and wonderful portrait about her and her work in the magazine “make ideas work” (Publisher: Gateway Exzellenz Start-up-Center, University of Cologne, Author: Manuel Heckel, Photos: Natalie Bothur). Among other things, it says:

[…] How is it possible to direct research in such a way that the results lead to socially relevant applications - in short, to innovations? Nine professors have taken on this task, including Professor Dr. Katarzyna (Kasia) Bozek (comment CMMC: whose lab is located in the interdisciplinary environment of the Center for Molecular Medicine Cologne). The positions were created by the Gateway Excellence Start-up Center of the University of Cologne. 

Kasia's path could have been more straightforward, easier and certainly more comfortable. Having studied computer science in Warsaw in the early 2000s, she had actually laid the foundations for a successful IT career. But the prospect of working in industry for years was not enough for her: "I quickly found it very limiting to only work as a software engineer," Kasia recalls today. Almost two decades and many positions around the globe later, she has arrived in a position where she is more likely to break down barriers than experience restrictions.

As Professor of Data Analytics in Bioinformatics, Kasia has been working at the interface of two highly technological and highly innovative topics since summer 2022: on the one hand, biomedicine, the importance of which has increased massively in recent decades - as a source of groundbreaking treatments for diseases for which no therapy seemed possible for a long time. On the other hand, there is data analysis, above all artificial intelligence, which has made enormous progress in the past three years alone. "This involves sophisticated algorithms that are applied to highly relevant topics," says Kasia, describing her field of research. […]