Ewa Szczurek and Żaneta Świderska-Chadaj join ELLIS Unit Warsaw

We are pleased to announce that two outstanding researchers have joined the ELLIS Unit Warsaw – Prof. Ewa Szczurek and Prof. Żaneta Świderska-Chadaj.

Prof. Ewa Szczurek is the co-director of the Institute of AI for Health at Helmholtz Munich, Germany (from February 2024), and leads joint labs at Helmholtz Munich and at the Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Mechanics of the University of Warsaw, Poland. She was a visiting associate professor at Northwestern University in the United States (2023) and a visiting fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Bielefeld, Germany (2016). She holds master’s degrees in computer science from the University of Warsaw, Poland, and Uppsala University, Sweden. Furthermore, she obtained her doctoral degree from the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin (2011), followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in Switzerland at ETH Zurich.

Prof. Szczurek was a recipient of the distinction, scientific and didactic awards from the Rector of the University of Warsaw, as well as ETH Zurich and IMPRS fellowships for her postdoctoral and doctoral research. She acts as a program committee member for the ISMB and RECOMB-CCB conferences, as well as an associate editor for Genome Biology. Her research focuses on artificial intelligence, in particular probabilistic graphical models and deep generative models, and their applications in computational medicine. Her specific applications include oncology, pulmonology and the AI-driven design of antimicrobial peptides, a work for which she was recently awarded the ERC Consolidator grant.

Prof. Żaneta Świderska-Chadaj is an expert in the biomedical and biological image analysis domain and leader of the Medical Pathology Diagnostics research team at IDEAS NCBR, where the ELLIS Unit Warsaw operates. Her research is of an application and interdisciplinary nature, combining fields such as deep learning, machine learning and vision, biology, and medicine. She is a professor at Warsaw University of Technology, where she conducts research in the biomedical area.

She was a postdoc in the Computational Pathology Group at Radboud, the Netherlands (2017-2020) and Visiting Research at Cedar-Sinai Medical Center, the USA, in 2019, and at Castilla La Mancha University, Spain, in 2017. Furthermore, she is a laureate of the Start FNP scholarship, the Minister’s Scholarship for Outstanding Young Scientists, and the “Polityka Science Award”.