Ewa Szczurek
Associate Professor, Institute of Informatics, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland
Biography
Prof. Ewa Szczurek is the co-director of the Institute of AI for Health at Helmholtz Munich, Germany (from Feb 2024), and leads joint labs at Helmholtz Munich and at the Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Mechanics of the University of Warsaw, Poland. She was a visiting associate professor at Northwestern University in the United States (2023) and a visiting fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Bielefeld, Germany (2016). She holds Master degrees in computer science from the University of Warsaw, Poland and Uppsala University, Sweden. She obtained her doctoral degree from the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin (2011), followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in Switzerland at ETH Zurich. Prof. Szczurek was a recipient of the distinction, scientific and didactic awards from the Rector of the University of Warsaw, as well as ETH Zurich and IMPRS fellowships for her postdoctoral and doctoral research. She acts as a program committee member for the ISMB and RECOMB-CCB conferences, as well as associate editor for Genome Biology. Her research focuses on artificial intelligence, in particular probabilistic graphical models and deep generative models, and their applications in computational medicine. Her specific applications include oncology, pulmonology and the AI-driven design of antimicrobial peptides, a work for which she was recently awarded the ERC Consolidator grant.