Industry Symposium on “AI in the Life Sciences”

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Background

When the B-IT was founded, the mission was clear: B-IT was supposed to focus on  translational research that - from the perspective of the programs initiated by the University of Bonn - should address and solve problems in the biotechnology, the medical technology and the pharmaceutical industry.

The resulting University of Bonn educational programs included the international Life Science Informatics (LSI) Master program and the doctoral program Computational Life Sciences (CLS), both of which were conceptualized and founded at the B-IT and continue to be administered there.      

From the beginning, groups involved in the LSI/CLS curriculum were very successful in collaborating with the commercial sector. Most importantly, our Master and PhD students got involved in industrial research projects early-on. Considerable funding directly from the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry has helped to grow the LSI research groups. Some of our students have taken the route into leading academic research institutions, but an equally large number has joined industrial research and some of them are now in leading positions in the biotechnology- and pharmaceutical industries.

Mission accomplished

The LSI/CLS curriculum was not only one of the earliest international curricula at the University of Bonn; it was also one of the most successful Master curricula. A constant high number of applications for the curriculum indicates that the topics taught at B-IT are attractive. As one of only a few curriculae in the natural sciences faculty, we managed to attract a considerable number of US-American students. Diversity and internationalism meets application-orientation and that results in an excellent balance between “application” on one side and “academic excellence” on the other side.

Time for an LSI-Industry-Symposium

This year sees B-IT for 20 years in operation. Since approximately the same time the teams contributing to the LSI curriculum work with industry partners at European and Global scale. We believe that it is time again to organize a meeting of industry partners of B-IT in the life science informatics context. We want to listen to some of our alumni who have made great careers in academia and industry. We intend to share how successful collaboration with industry looks like in the B-IT (LSI) context. That is why we want to invite some of our collaboration partners and celebrate the 20 years of B-IT with a dedicated, industrial research symposium.

Thematic Focus

Of course, AI in the Life Sciences is one of the hottest topics in translational biomedical informatics. We therefore want to put a spotlight onto various “applied” AI research themes with high relevance for innovation in the industry.