Assistant Professor Dr. Maria Kalweit has taken over the newly established CRIION Professorship for Bioinformatics with a focus on Artificial Intelligence in Oncology Research at the University of Freiburg. The endowed tenure track professorship at the Institute of Computer Science of the Faculty of Engineering, which started on October 1, is intended to develop machine learning and bioinformatics methods to enable data-driven approaches for diagnosis, prognosis and therapy in oncology and hematology.

The professorship addresses challenges such as limited amounts of data, high biological variance, and technical differences by creating models that learn with few examples and provide transparent predictions. These are intended to support doctors in their decision-making process. The professorship is financed by the Mertelsmann Foundation gGmbH with around 1.3 million euros over six years.

The university management emphasizes the importance of AI methods for the university’s research strength and emphasizes the potential benefits for patients through more precise diagnoses and improved therapies. The Faculty of Engineering sees the professorship as an important interface to medicine, which creates synergies for cancer treatment.

Kalweit’s work focuses on AI-supported diagnostic systems, predictive models for disease progression and optimization of personalized therapies. She sees AI as a partner in personalized medicine that recognizes patterns from large amounts of data without replacing medical expertise.

In order to accelerate the transfer into clinical practice, close interdisciplinary cooperation is planned, including professorships from the Faculty of Engineering, the University Medical Center Freiburg and the Faculty of Medicine. The professorship is integrated into research networks such as BrainLinks-BrainTools, the Cluster of Excellence CIBSS, the Collaborative Research Center 1597 Small Data, the Comprehensive Cancer Center Freiburg and projects of the Collaborative Research Institute Intelligent Oncology (CRIION).

Kalweit received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Freiburg in 2022 and subsequently worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Neurorobotics Lab. She has been leading Applied AI Research at CRIION since 2022 and has served as Chief Scientific Officer since 2025. She has received several awards, including the Gips-Schüle Young Talent Award 2024, the Wolfgang Gentner Young Talent Award 2023 and a Best Paper Award 2018.

The CRIION, initiated in 2022 by the Mertelsmann Foundation in cooperation with the University of Freiburg and the University Medical Center Freiburg as well as other groups, coordinates research projects on adaptive, personalized cancer therapy. It uses AI to identify digital biomarkers from image and omics data, predict disease progression, and optimize therapies in real time to bridge basic research and clinical application.

Editor: X-Press Journalistenbüro GbR

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