Aithyra – A place of scientific innovation and accelerated impact has dual scientific leadership in AI and Life Sciences

Michael Bronstein, Scientific Director AI of AITHYRA, will bring world-leading expertise in developing novel machine learning technique for biological applications as well as a track record of research commercialization and technological spinoffs and industrial experience.

Michael Bronstein is the DeepMind Professor of AI at the University of Oxford. His research interests lie in geometric deep learning, graph neural networks, 3D shape analysis, protein design, non-human species communication. Michael Bronstein was previously Head of Graph Learning Research at Twitter, a Professor at Imperial College London and held visiting appointments at Stanford, MIT, and Harvard. Michael Bronstein received his PhD from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology in 2007. He is the recipient of the EPSRC Turing AI World Leading Research Fellowship, Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal, five ERC grants, two Google Faculty Research Awards, and two Amazon AWS ML Research Awards. He is a Member of the Academia Europaea, Fellow of IEEE, IAPR, BCS, and ELLIS, ACM Distinguished Speaker, and World Economic Forum Young Scientist. In addition to his academic career, Michael Bronstein is a serial entrepreneur and founder of multiple startup companies, including Novafora, Invision (acquired by Intel in 2012), Videocites, and Fabula AI (acquired by Twitter in 2019).

mbronstein@aithyra.at

Georg Winter, Scientific Director Life Sciences of AITHYRA, is an international award-winning scientist, ERC prize winner and co-founder of start-up companies. Georg Winter’s work in targeted protein degradation is not only advancing fundamental research but also paving the way for practical applications.

Georg Winter obtained his PhD from the Medical University of Vienna, working on elucidating the mechanism of action of anti-neoplastic drugs under the supervision of Giulio Superti-Furga at CeMM. He specialized in proteomics as well as chemical genetic approaches to identifying drug resistance mechanisms and on mechanistically elucidating synergistic drug combinations. He continued his training in chemical biology, working as a postdoctoral fellow with James Bradner at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute/Harvard Medical School. There, he innovated a generalizable pharmacological solution to in vivo target protein degradation and applied this strategy to the study of leukemic gene regulation. Georg Winter was recruited as CeMM Principal Investigator in June 2016. His lab developed and applied methods for target protein degradation with the ultimate goal of understanding and disrupting oncogenic transcriptional circuits. The Winter laboratory combines phenotypic drug screens, chemical genetics, and drug-target identification approaches with holistic measurements of global gene activity and genome structure. Georg Winter’s contributions to the field of targeted protein degradation were acknowledged via multiple prices and awards, including the Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award, the EFMC Prize for Young Chemical Biologist in Academia, the German Lectureship for Chemical Biology, the Wilson S. Stone Memorial Award from MD Anderson, the Eppendorf Award for European Scientists, and the Elisabeth Lutz Award of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

gwinter@aithyra.at

Anita Ender, Managing Director of AITHYRA, is well grounded in human resources and management skills, and will form a bridge to the medical Campus Vienna.

Since 2014 Anita Ender has been the Administrative Director and CEO of CeMM, the Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences leading a team of 35 administrative and scientific support members. She played a major role in building up the institute, being a highly considered dialogue partner for the Scientific Director Giulio Superti-Furga, and Faculty. Before joining CeMM, she gained experience at the Institute for Biomedical Aging Research, a former research institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Innsbruck, and worked for the President of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) Georg Wick. Anita Ender was elected Board Member of the conference of the 27 institute directors of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Chair of the Board of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Rare and Undiagnosed Diseases in Vienna, recently became Board Member of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Network Medicine and is part of the Strategy Group of EU-LIFE, an alliance of 17 Top Life Science institutes in Europe, as well as an Evaluation Board Member of CERCA Research Centers of Catalonia. 

aender@aithyra.at