Our Network

Institutions

The Rhine-Neckar triangle hosts a strong concentration of world-renowned life science research and healthcare institutions:

European Molecular Biology Lab (EMBL)

The European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) is Europe’s flagship institute for life science research, operating across six sites with its headquarter located in Heidelberg and supported by 29 member states. For more than 50 years, EMBL has driven major advances in understanding life and has trained generations of leading scientists.

As a global hub for biodata, EMBL shapes the digital transformation of biology through open data standards, pioneering bioinformatics, and key contributions to AI innovations such as AlphaFold. Its Heidelberg headquarters hosts cutting-edge platforms in genome biology, imaging, and systems biology and already connects actively with the ELLIS network. With its international mandate, technological breadth, and deep biological expertise, EMBL provides an exceptional environment for research at the interface of AI and the life sciences.

German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ)

The German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) is the largest biomedical research institute in Germany. More than 3,500 employees in over 100 scientific divisions and research groups are investigating the mechanisms of cancer, identifying cancer risk factors, discovering strategies to prevent cancer, and developing novel approaches to make cancer treatment more successful.

DKFZ combines cutting-edge biology with advanced data science, operating major national infrastructures for cancer genomics, imaging, and biomedical computing. Data science research in the health sciences at DKFZ focuses on (gen-)omics, medical image analysis, surgery, clinical record, and prevention. More than 300 researchers in the Digital Oncology Cross Topic develop and employ computational methods to analyze health data, conducting basic research like the characterization of tumors and other cells, analysis of cellular networks, and personalized oncology. Others employ machine learning and deep learning to advance cancer research and treatment.

Heidelberg University (HU)

Heidelberg University is Germany’s oldest and one of Germany’s leading universities. The academic spectrum spans the humanities, social sciences, law, natural and life sciences, engineering, and medicine. Surrounded by a multitude of dedicated research institutes, the University with its 30,000 students from across the world provides a vibrant interdisciplinary research environment.

Building on ambitious computational and data-driven research programs of the different faculties, the Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing (IWR) serves as the hub for numerical and AI-driven research. Its groups are developing scientific AI methods for modeling, simulation, optimization, and data analysis. The corresponding AI applications cover the entire research spectrum of the university. For instance, biological data science uses scientific AI to translate large-scale omics data into biological insight, numerical chemistry uses generative AI to simulate reaction processes and their dynamics, while physics applies AI-methods to extract fundamental knowledge in data-intensive fields, such as environmental physics, astrophysics, and particle physics.

These world-leading topical research programs combined with an established interdisciplinary culture and an excited and talented student population position Heidelberg University as a key hub for scientific AI research, from method development to high-profile applications.

Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Medical Research

The vision of the MPI for Medical Research is to advance medical research through the collaboration of physiology, biology, physics, and chemistry, thus creating knowledge of long-term relevance to basic medical science. The unifying theme of the research is to observe and manipulate the complex molecular and cellular interactions that are the basis of life.

Heidelberg University Hospital (UKHD)

As one of Europe’s largest and most modern medical centers, UKHD has 43 specialist departments providing medical care of the highest international standards in all areas of specialty with a focus on oncology care and on other diseases that require complex treatments.

Within the division for minimally invasive and robot-assisted surgery, the research group Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Robotics investigates methods of AI and cognitive robotics to improve surgical treatment with a strong focus on clinical translation to help surgeons choose the best treatment option for the individual patient. Projects include predicting life-threatening complications during and after surgery via machine learning on multimodal process data, enabling personalized treatment decisions for patients based on data-driven approaches, providing data scientists with open surgical datasets to benchmark their algorithms, and annotating surgical data for the use in supervised machine learning as a basis for context-aware surgical assistance, robot-assisted surgery, and endoscopic vision challenges.

University Medical Center Mannheim (UMM)

UMM is a full-service acute care medical center with 4,800 employees. Each year, more than 250,000 outpatients and hospitalized patients receive medical treatment and care here.

Medical Systems Technology plays an important role in the research and clinical application of new diagnostic procedures and minimally invasive therapies. Examples include projects in the fields of radiomics and radiotherapy, but also in digital pathology and bioinformatics. The aim of research in Medical Imaging Informatics and Radiomics is the validation and standardization of quantitative imaging biomarkers including radiomics and their safe translation into clinical practice, and to evaluate the realistic potential of machine-based learning methods, including deep learning, for workflow optimization and diagnosis in radiology. The Mannheim Institute for Intelligent Systems in Medicine focuses on the holistic investigation of basic methods and applications of intelligent systems for preclinical care, diagnosis, therapy, and organization in the entire process chain, starting from the metrological acquisition of data, their analysis and modeling, up to their application on the patient.

Central Institute of Mental Health (CIMH)

The CIMH is one of the leading institutions in psychiatric research in Europe and its objective is to study the causes and mechanisms of mental illnesses and develop new therapies in psychiatry and psychotherapy, child and adolescent psychiatry, psychosomatic medicine, and addiction medicine.

The CIMH has more than 1,400 employees and works closely with the University of Heidelberg and the Mannheim Medical Faculty of the University of Heidelberg.

The aim of the Hector Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Psychiatry (HITKIP) at the CIMH is to develop and apply advanced computational methods from the area of AI to uncover the causes of mental illness and thus contribute to the prevention and the improved clinical management of these disorders. The HITKIP combines the development of innovative AI technology, such as biologically informed and geo-distributed machine learning, interpretable machine learning models of dynamic neural systems, and advanced approaches for multimodal data integration into a coherent AI strategy geared towards the identification of illness and treatment-relevant effects. This research strategy is decidedly translational with the aim of implementing algorithms into tools that have a substantial positive impact on clinical care.

Our Network

Our Network

Institutions

Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Medical Research

Data Science Initiatives in the Region

Associated Members and Groups