Professorships
Jens Kleesiek, Prof. Dr. med. Dr. rer. nat.
Jens Kleesiek is the chair for Translational Image-guided Oncology and heading the department Medical Machine Learning at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (IKIM) of the University Medicine Essen (UME). Focus of his research is on the application of self-supervised and weakly supervised learning paradigms for recognition of clinically relevant patterns in large and complex data, and the integration of multimodal data sources to enhance the decision-making process at the point of care. He studied medicine in Heidelberg and bioinformatics in Hamburg, where he obtained his PhD in computer science in 2012. After training at the University Hospital Heidelberg and the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), he obtained his board certification (Facharzt) in radiology, his habilitation (venia legendi) and specialization (Zusatzweiterbildung) in medical informatics.
Roland Schwarz, Prof. Dr. rer. nat.
Roland Schwarz joined the CCCE in January 2022 as the Chair for Computational Cancer Biology at the University Hospital Cologne. His group develops machine learning algorithms for understanding intra-tumour heterogeneity and inferring cancer evolution, focusing on chromosomal instability and genome structure. Roland studied computer science at the University of Würzburg and finished his PhD in 2009. He then became a postdoc at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute and the University of Cambridge, and a Marie-Curie Fellow at EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). He also was awarded a Junior Research Fellowship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge in 2010 and won the Prize of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences in Cancer Research in 2016. Later that year he moved to Berlin as a Junior Group Leader at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association (MDC).
Christin Seifert (no longer involved in the CCCE), Prof. Dr. techn.
Christin Seifert has been appointed Chair of Medical Data Science in Oncology at the University of Duisburg-Essen in November 2020. She heads the department of Multimodal Computing & Machine Intelligence at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (IKIM) of the University Medicine Essen (UME). Her core research interests are machine learning with particular focus on explainable machine learning. Her research is characterised by interdisciplinarity and a broad range of application areas. Christin holds a Ph.D. from the Technical University Graz, Austria (Thesis Topic: Visually Supported Supervised Machine Learning) and a diploma (equiv. M.Sc.) in computer science from the Technical University Chemnitz, Germany. Before joining the CCCE she held assistant professorships at the University of Passau and the University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands and a visiting professorship at the Technical University of Dresden.
Renata Stripecke, Prof. Dr. rer. nat.
Renata Stripecke joined the University Hospital Cologne and the Cancer Research Center Cologne Essen (CCCE) as a full professor (W3) and Chair for Translational Immuno-Oncology in July 2022. She was previously an Associate Professor (W2) at the Department of Hematology, Hemostaseology, Oncology and Stem Cell Transplantation of the Hannover Medical School (MHH), where she headed the laboratory "Regenerative Immune Therapies Applied" of the Excellence Cluster Rebirth. Prof. Stripecke’s focus is the development of innovative immunotherapies against leukemia, lymphoma and chronic herpes viruses. Her laboratory developed novel strategies to target lymphomas and herpes infections with engineered chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells. Novel engineered dendritic to boost the T and B cells immune responses were tested preclinically. The technologies developed are patented or out-licensed. The translational program is complemented with modeling different types of cancer and immunotherapeutic approaches in fully humanized mouse models. The focus of her research at CCCE will be to make immunotherapies more effective and available to patients in need. Prof. Stripecke obtained her PhD at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg and her Habilitation at the University of Hamburg. She was a post-doctoral fellow and assistant professor at the University of Southern California (USC) and at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). She received the Special Fellow Award of The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and of the Howard Temin Award of the US-National Cancer Institute. She received research funding from the German Research Council (DFG), from the German Cancer Aid (DKH), from the German Center for Infections Research (DZIF) and from The Jackson Laboratory, among others.
