Helmholtz Munich and Northwestern University Partner to Advance Machine Learning in Health

Building on Strong Scientific Ties

The collaboration is rooted in long-standing connections between the two institutions. Prof. Fabian Theis, Director of the Computational Health Center at Helmholtz Munich, has been Adjunct Professor of Medicine at NU since 2019. His work with Dr. Alexander Misharin’s lab has already led to major advances, including the Human Lung Cell Atlas – the most comprehensive representation of gene expression in the human respiratory system. Furthermore, Ewa Szczurek, Co-Director of the Institute of AI for Health at Helmholtz Munich, presented at the Munich-Chicago Lung Conferences, held alternately in both cities over the last two years, with colleagues from NU.

Early-Career Researchers Lead the Way

The partnership is already yielding results. Shortly after the signature of the Memorandum of Understanding in September 2024, a first research visit occured, focused on time- and lineage-resolved twin/sister cell transcriptomes. More recently, PhD student Dinesh Adhithya Haridoss received BayIntAn funding – a Bavarian program for the initiation of international research collaborations – to launch a project with Northwestern’s Misharin lab on deep integrative modelling of multimodal medical data.

“These research stays create a space for bold ideas and new connections – it’s a key way to shape the next generation of interdisciplinary scientists and foster our collaboration”, says Ewa Szczurek, who previously spent a sabbatical at Northwestern and had two scientific visits to the Feinberg School of Medicine since then.