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LOEWE top professorship for Prof. Dr. Heinz Koeppl at TU Darmstadt on artificial intelligence and synthetic biology
The state of Hesse has awarded Prof. Dr. Heinz Koeppl a LOEWE top professorship at the Technical University of Darmstadt and is funding his research with around three million euros over five years. The support is part of the Hessian research funding program LOEWE and underlines the importance of his work at the interface of artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology.
Prof. Koeppl is regarded as a leading international scientist in the field of computer-aided biological systems research. His LOEWE-funded work focuses on the development of AI algorithms that design new genetic circuits and functional RNA molecules with potential applications in medicine, biosensors and biotechnology. This creates a closed research cycle: with the help of automated laboratory technologies and high-throughput processes, large amounts of data can be generated and used directly for training AI models.
“Prof. Dr. Koeppl is an internationally renowned expert in computational synthetic biology - a highly interesting field of research that opens up new ways of investigating cell biological processes and also allows us to design completely new molecular systems,” said Science Minister Timon Gremmels. "[his] scientific work has received numerous awards, including funding from the European Research Council. He has made pioneering contributions to genetic circuits and biomolecular structures for biosensor technology, medicine and biotechnology. With the LOEWE professorship for Prof. Dr. Koeppl, we are also strengthening the successful Hessian Cluster of Excellence ‘RAI - Reasonable Artificial Intelligence’.
Heinz Koeppl has been Professor of Self-Organizing Systems at TU Darmstadt since 2014. He studied physics in Graz, conducted international research at UC Berkeley and ETH Zurich, among others, and has received several prestigious grants from the European Research Council. He is spokesperson for the Center for Synthetic Biology, a member of hessian.AI and is involved in numerous interdisciplinary projects within and outside TU Darmstadt.