The LOEWE state program provides around three million euros for Heinz Koeppl’s research into synthetic biology and AI
Heinz Koeppl has been awarded a LOEWE Excellence Professorship at TU Darmstadt. In the Self-Organizing Systems Lab of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, he is investigating how artificial intelligence (AI) can improve the design of new biomolecules and genetic circuits in synthetic biology. The state is providing around three million euros from LOEWE funds over a total of five years.
“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,” says Science Minister Timon Gremmels.
The project combines modern AI technologies with synthetic biology to find new ways in medicine and biotechnology. The focus is on genetic circuits. They control the activity of genes and thus the function of cells and organisms - and are programmable. The aim of the LOEWE Excellence Professorship is to develop AI algorithms that design functional RNA molecules for therapeutic applications and complex genetic circuits.
To this end, special high-throughput measurement methods are being developed that can be used to analyze a large number of samples for specific biochemical properties simultaneously. This generates large amounts of experimental data for training the AI models. With the help of laboratory robotics and AI, the researchers are thus creating a closed cycle in which they can automatically generate and test biomolecules and genetic circuits for the first time.
Heinz Koeppl studied physics at the Karl-Franzens-University Graz, received his doctorate at TU Graz and subsequently conducted postdoctoral research at the University of California in Berkeley, at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and at ETH Zurich. He has been Professor of Self-Organizing Systems at TU Darmstadt since 2014. In 2017, he received an ERC Consolidator Grant, followed by two further ERC Proof-of-Concept Grants in 2020 and 2022. Koeppl is spokesperson for the Center for Synthetic Biology at TU Darmstadt, a member of hessian.AI and a scientist in the Cluster of Excellence “RAI - Reasonable Artificial Intelligence”. At the LOEWE research center emergenCITY, he conducts research as Principle Investigator in the Communication program area.
With LOEWE Excellence Professorships, excellent, internationally recognized researchers can receive between 1.5 and 3 million euros for five years to endow their professorship.
LOEWE Start Professorships are aimed at excellent researchers at an early stage of their career, who are recruited or retained in Hesse as a science location for a period of six years with funding of up to two million euros.
The LOEWE Transfer professorships, currently in the pilot phase, support researchers in further developing application-oriented results in exchange with partners from the application in such a way that they successfully contribute to solving social, cultural or economic issues. The funding amounts to up to one million euros to endow a professorship for five years.
Author: HMWK
The full press release of the HMWK can be found here
