Dr. Katarzyna Bozek appointed to W2 professorship in Data Analytics at the Faculty of Medicine, Univ. of Cologne

Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Katarzyna Bozek, Image: Michael Wodak

With the appointment of Katarzyna Bozek, the Faculty of Medicine is pursuing the goal of strengthening and expanding digitization and technology transfer at the University Medical Center with computer-based research.

The computer scientist's research focus is on the development and application of machine learning, including deep learning as well as statistical and algorithmic methods. Throughout her research, she has worked on a variety of medical topics, including circadian regulation, HIV-host interaction, human evolution, and novel methods for quantifying natural behavior. Her fundamental interest is extracting information from large and complex data sets and finding solutions to the computational challenges involved.

Katarzyna Bozek explains: "I work with my research group to solve big data problems in biology and medicine. By using Deep Learning, we aim to develop new data-driven approaches to the study of image and video data in medicine. Our theoretical interests lie in the use and development of machine learning. We are looking for appropriate ways of representing data to solve specific scientific questions - for example, in cancer and aging research." Detailed information about Prof. Bozek's research activities under https://www.bozek-lab.cmmc-uni-koeln.de/

As part of the successful acquisition of third-party funding totaling 3.4 million euros (in the BMBF's eMed Junior Research program and the NRW Return Program), Prof. Bozek decided to continue her research at the Center for Molecular Medicine Cologne (CMMC) at the University of Cologne with her NRW Return Program Grant in 2020.  The integration into the CMMC enabled Katarzyna Bozek to establish a research network within a short time bringing together researchers and clinician scientists of the Medical Faculty, the Science Faculty, the University Hospital as well as external institutions. In her teaching, the computer scientist focuses in particular on teaching flexibility in translating analytical ideas, concepts and methods and transferring them to scientific applications.

"Katarzyna Bozek's research creates synergies by bringing together and networking biomedical and computational research at the University and the University Hospital Cologne. Her projects have great potential for technology transfer and a direct impact on socially relevant biomedical issues," comments Prof. Gereon R. Fink, the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and member of the board of the University Hospital Cologne.

Born in Poland in 1982, Prof. Bozek studied computer science in 2005 at the University of Warsaw/Poland. In 2006, she moved to the Institute of Theoretical Biology at Humboldt University in Berlin, and from there to the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science in Saarbrücken as a PhD student in 2007, where she received her PhD in 2011. She then worked as a postdoctoral researcher until 2015 at the CAS-MPG Partner Institute for Computational Biology, Shanghai, a joint venture of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Max- Planck Society, and at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. From 2015 to 2019, she engaged as a research group leader at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Okinawa, Japan. Since February 2020, Prof. Bozek has been working as a research group leader at the Center for Molecular Medicine Cologne in Cologne.