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Christoph Bock received the prestigious Erwin Schrödinger Award of the Austrian Academy of Sciences

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Christoph Bock and his group at the ÖAW’s ceremony on 8 June 2022 (© CeMM).

CeMM congratulates Principal Investigator Christoph Bock on being awarded the Erwin Schrödinger Award of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) for his pioneering achievements in the field of single-cell sequencing and epigenetics. The Erwin Schrödinger Award together with the Wilhelm Hartel Prize are the highest prizes awarded annually by the ÖAW.

Epigenetics have been one of the main interests of bioinformatician Christoph Bock’s biomedical research, he looks beyond DNA and the processes that control the activity and availability of the human genes. Christoph Bock, an expert in complex data analysis, conducts interdisciplinary research with the aim of understanding the epigenetic and gene regulatory basis of cancer and advancing precision medicine with genomics technology. To this end, he and his research group at CeMM performed the first single-cell sequencing in Austria and developed an early method for epigenetic analysis of single cells. 

About the Erwin Schrödinger Award
Started in 1956, the prize itself is named after Erwin Schrödinger, a Viennese-born mathematician and physicist known for his contributions to wave mechanics and theoretical physics. The Erwin Schrödinger Award is given to scientists working in Austria or at an international research institution relating to Austria or with Austrian participation who have produced outstanding academic achievements in fields broadly represented by the Division of Mathematics and the Natural Sciences of the ÖAW. The prize is endowed with 15,000 euros.

About Christoph Bock
Christoph Bock joined CeMM as Principal Investigator in 2012. He is also Professor of Medical Informatics at the Medical University of Vienna (MedUni Vienna), where he runs the Institute of Artificial Intelligence in the data science department. His research combines experimental biology (high-throughput sequencing, epigenetics, CRISPR screening, synthetic biology) with computational methods (bioinformatics, machine learning, artificial intelligence) for cancer, immunology, and precision medicine. Before coming to Vienna, he was a postdoc at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (2008–2011) and a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics (2004–2008). Christoph Bock also coordinates the Biomedical Sequencing Facility of CeMM and MedUni Vienna and contributes to the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Rare and Undiagnosed Diseases (LBI-RUD). He is a fellow of the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) and an elected member of the Young Academy of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He has received major research awards, including the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society (2009), an ERC Starting Grant (2016–2021), an ERC Consolidator Grant (2021–2026), and the Overton Prize of the International Society for Computational Biology (2017).

We also warmly congratulate Barbara Seidlhofer, Professor of English and Applied Linguistics, who was honored with the Wilhelm Hartel Award for her fundamental contributions to the founding and (further) development of the research field of English as a Lingua Franca!