(Vienna, 09 June 2022) Christoph Bock, Professor of Medical Informatics and Head of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support at MedUni Vienna's Center for Medical Statistics, Informatics and Intelligent Systems, has been awarded the Erwin Schrödinger Prize by the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Christoph Bock has a PhD in computer science and a broad range of interests and for many years has been working at the interface between biology, medicine and computer science. His research group combines data-based methods (bioinformatics, machine learning, artificial intelligence) with modern molecular biology techniques (genome sequencing, CRISPR technology, systems biology). He is particularly interested in new techniques for precision medicine, on which he works in close collaboration with clinical research groups with the aim of improving diagnosis and treatment.
Christoph Bock has led a research group at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) in Vienna since 2012. Before that he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Harvard University (2008-2011) and a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics (2004-2008). In 2021, Christoph Bock took over the Chair in Medical Informatics at the Medical University of Vienna, as well as the leadership of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support at the Center for Medical Statistics, Informatics and Intelligent Systems at MedUni Vienna (CeMSIIS). He has received major research grants, including the Otto Hahn Medal from the Max Planck Society (2009), an ERC Starting Grant (2016-2021), an ERC Consolidator Grant (2021-2026), and the Overton Prize from the International Society for Computational Biology (2017). He joined Clarivate Analytics' list of Highly Cited Researchers in 2019.
About the Erwin Schrödinger Prize
The Erwin Schrödinger Prize is awarded to academics who are active in Austria or in an international institution with a connection to Austria or with Austrian participation and who have made outstanding scientific achievements in the disciplines represented in the broadest sense by the Mathematical and Natural Sciences Class of the ÖAW.
During the event, the Wilhelm Hartel Prize was also awarded to the Anglicist Barbara Seidlhofer from the University of Vienna.