Scientific Director

Priv.-Doz. Dr. Wolfgang Müller

Scientific Director

Wolfgang Müller leads the Scientific Databases and Visualisation Group at HITS. He is Privatdozent at the Department for Business Informatics and Applied Informatics at the Universität Bamberg.

1996 he obtained a Diploma degree in physics at the University of Constance, with experimental work on soap foams at the CNRS Institute Charles Sadron at Strasbourg. He studied Computer Science in parallel at the FernUni Hagen. He obtained his diploma with a diploma thesis about data mining. 2001 he obtained a doctorat es sciences in Geneva (Prof. Dr. Thierry Pun), with work on Content Based Image Retrieval, i.e. finding images by their visual content. In 2008 he obtained a Habilitation degree at the University of Bamberg (2008) with work about Peer-to-Peer Information Retrieval, i.e. working on similarity search in distributed self-organising systems. Since 2008 Wolfgang Müller has been working at HITS, first as deputy group leader, then as successor of HITS Fellow Dr. Isabel Rojas (1968-2013), who had founded the group in 1999.

SDBV creates, populates and maintains data base applications, mostly for the use in systems biology. System biology strives to reach a systems understanding of biological systems. The challenges that SDBV addresses range from data integrations and efficient data structures to Human Computer Interaction, as well as social aspects of Open Data.

Müller has been coordinator of the data management of the systems biology Großprojekt (large project) Virtual Liver Network, and is data management coordinator of the currently running LiSyM (Liver SystemsMedicine) Großprojekt. He is also HITS’ delegate in transnational life sciences infrastructure initiatives as FAIRDOM, ISBE, and ELIXIR.

Prof. Dr. Frauke Gräter

Deputy Scientific Director

Frauke Gräter is group leader of the Molecular Biomechanics group (MBM) at HITS and Professor for Molecular Biomechanics at Heidelberg University.

She studied chemistry in Tübingen, Kyoto and Heidelberg and did her Ph.D. at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, Germany, in 2005. After postdoc positions, among them at Columbia University, New York, USA, she became leader of a junior group in Shanghai, China, at the partner institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Max Planck Society. Since 2009, Frauke Gräter has been group leader of the Molecular Biomechanics (MBM) group at HITS. Additionally, she became professor for molecular biomechanics at Heidelberg University in 2014, and since 2017 she is member of the board of directors at the Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing (IWR) at Heidelberg University.

The major interest of Frauke Gräter and her Molecular Biomechanics group is to decipher how proteins have been designed to specifically respond to mechanical forces in the cellular environment or as a biomaterial. For this purpose, they use high performance computing (HPC) and simulation techniques on different scales. In her research, Frauke Gräter covers medicine topics like blood clotting as well as materials science on spider silk or nacre.  For her outstanding impact on HPC research, Frauke Gräter was awarded PRACE Ada Lovelace Award for HPC.