Lorenz pursues a collaborative, extremely valuable and general project – the development of deep learning methods for the automated and efficient analysis of cryo-electron tomograms, e.g. for membrane segmentation, particle localization, and extraction of spatial statistics. He plans to apply the developed methods in several projects of general biological importance. Accordingly, his highly innovative work is positioned at the interface of the Helmholtz Pioneer Campus and Helmholtz AI, being hosted and co-supervised in the Pioneer-lab of Ben Engel and Tingying Peng @Helmholtz_AI, respectively. The support of the Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation will enable Lorenz to continue his ambitious project, and he is quite aware of the various obstacles that still need to be addressed. "There are challenges we need to overcome – for instance, the limited image quality or the small amount of annotated data available” Lorenz points to some problems he wants to tackle as Boehringer Ingelheim Fellow.
Get closer insights into Lorenz’ project in his PhD elevator pitch from the Helmholtz AI conference 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgV15VE-kZE&t=4s
The Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds is a non-profit foundation for the support of basic biomedical research. The fund provides scholarships for outstanding junior researchers, supporting mobility within Europe and overseas. In addition to a basic amount, the scholarship covers travel expenses and/or participation in a conference, as well as crucial access to the very dynamic Boehringer Ingelheim fellow network.
The Helmholtz Pioneer Campus is an innovation campus with a startup culture at the Helmholtz Zentrum München. HPC stands for the intelligent fusion of biomedical sciences, engineering and digitization. Teams of top scientific talents from all over the world work together on the development of novel solutions that makes a difference in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases. HPC aspires the values of Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894), a physician and physicist, polymath and science pioneer.