Leader of the group Life Sciences: Gunnar Klau

We develop mathematical and computational techniques to help understand the complexity of living systems.  

In the life sciences, conventional wet lab experimentation is being increasingly accompanied by mathematical and computational techniques. These so-called dry methods analyze and guide experiments, generate and test hypotheses, and thus offer novel biological insight. They will continue to impact research in biology and the medical sciences in the coming years fundamentally. 

The Life Sciences group at CWI is an interdisciplinary team of mathematicians, computer scientists, theoretical biologists, and bioinformaticians performing fundamental research on algorithms, theory, models and simulations for a wide range of biological topics. Research concentrates on modeling and simulation of biological processes and the analysis of biological data using discrete algorithms.

 We carry out highly interdisciplinary research and therefore maintain strong links to cooperation partners from biology and biomedicine, including the Dutch Cancer Institute (NKI) and the Free University Medical Center (VUMC) Amsterdam. CWI is also one of the four partners within the Netherlands Institute for Systems Biology (NISB) and hosts the modeling core group of the Netherlands Consortium for Systems Biology (NCSB).

Research Topics

• Algorithmic Computational Biology
• Biomodeling and Biosystems Analysis
• Combinatorial Problems in Biology
• Neuroinformatics
• Scientific Computing for Systems Biology
• Statistical Modeling and Comparative Genomics
• Systems Biology of Regulatory Molecular Networks

We always welcome talented and motivated Master's students who want to do their graduation thesis work in the CWI Life Sciences group. Click here for more information.