New Scientific Director: Kai Polsterer

As of January 2025, Kai Polsterer is the new Scientific Director of the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS). As the position of Scientific Director rotates through the group leaders, this is a planned change in the HITS management. Tilmann Gneiting, who had been Scientific Director for the last two years, stepped down from this position at the end of the year. The new deputy Scientific Director will be Rebecca Wade.

Kai Polsterer has served as head of the “Astroinformatics” group at HITS since 2013, the first European research group in that field. Polsterer has developed new methods and tools to deal with the exponentially increasing amount of data in that field, with a focus on developing tailored machine learning solutions. He is involved in an ERC Synergy Grant to measure the scale of the Universe, and works in a number of interdisciplinary projects with statisticians and medical scientists, which lead to introducing new approaches to optimize weather forecasts as well as to cardiological analyses. Polsterer has been founding board member and is the current president of the International Astroinformatics Association (IAIA). Moreover, he is member of the IEEE “task-force on mining complex astronomical data“, member of an international team at the International Space Science Institute (ISSI), and contributes to several other national and international scientific bodies and associations.

Rebecca Wade set up the Molecular and Cellular Modeling Group at HITS (formerly known as EML European Media Laboratory and later as EML Research) in 2001. Since 2012, she has been full Professor at Heidelberg University and is a member of the Faculty of Engineering Sciences and the Faculty of Biosciences. She was the first Scientific Director of HITS from 2015 to 2016. Rebecca Wade’s research focuses on the development and application of computer-aided methods to model and simulate biomolecular interactions. Her research group has developed novel protein structure-based methods for drug discovery and protein engineering, most recently for studying drug binding kinetics, as well as multiresolution computational approaches to investigate macromolecular association and the effects of macromolecular crowding. Wade is Editor-in-Chief of the “Journal of Molecular Recognition”, and member of several editorial boards in biophysics, computational biology, and chemistry journals. She was and has been member of numerous boards and committees, among them the Scientific Advisory Board of Leibniz-Institute for Molecular Pharmacology, and the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics. She is Scientific Chair of the QSAR, Chemoinformatics and Modeling Society (QCMS). Since 2021, she has been coordinator of the SIMPLAIX inter-institutional cooperation of HITS, Heidelberg University and KIT on combining machine learning and multiscale simulation to study biomolecules and molecular materials.

The Scientific Director is selected among the HITS group leaders and appointed by the shareholders. The Scientific Director represents the Institute in all scientific matters vis-à-vis cooperation partners and the public.