Horizons 20XX: Karsten Borgwardt, MPI of Biochemistry

Special Lecture Series, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Gene Center Munich

Outstanding speakers who are doing pioneering research present the current status of their work and take a look at the future development of the field.

Karsten Borgwardt, Research Department Machine Learning and Systems Biology, MPI Biochemistry

Big data analysis and biomedical research meet in the Borgwardt lab: They develop novel data mining algorithms to detect patterns and statistical dependencies in large datasets from biology and medicine.
The team is working towards two central goals: To enable the automatic generation of new knowledge from big data through machine learning, and to gain an understanding of the relationship between the function of biological systems and their molecular properties.

Host:

Karl-Peter Hopfner

Location:

Gene Center Munich
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Lynen Lecture Hall (A 0.75)
Feodor-Lynen-Straße 25
81377 Munich

About Karsten Borgwardt
Karsten Borgwardt (born in 1980) completed a master course in biology at the University of Oxford in 2003, as well as a Diplom program in computer science at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich in 2004. During his studies in Munich, Oxford and Canberra, he was a scholar of the Stiftung Maximilianeum, the Bavarian Foundation for the Promotion of the Gifted and the German Academic Merit Foundation. He completed his doctoral thesis at the Institute for Informatics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich in 2007, which later won the Heinz Schwärtzel Dissertation Award for Foundations of Computer Science. After a postdoctoral employment in Cambridge, Borgwardt became a research group leader for Machine Learning and Computational Biology at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics and at the former Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology (since 2022 MPI for Biology) in Tübingen. In 2011, he was also appointed professor of data mining in the life sciences at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. In 2013, he received the Alfried Krupp Award, which is endowed with one million Euro. In 2014, he was awarded a Starting Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation. He is and has been coordinating large national and international research consortia for machine learning in medicine, including two Marie Curie innovative training networks and the Personalized Swiss Sepsis Study for predicting sepsis using machine learning. He left the MPG to become an associate professor at ETH Zurich in 2014, where he joined the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering in Basel. In 2017, he was promoted to the rank of full professor. In 2023, Borgwardt returned to the Max Planck Society as a director and scientific member.