Two new professorships to be established at FAU as part of Bavaria’s digitalisation initiative

Medicine and industrial production to be the focus

FAU has done well in the Bavarian government’s digitalisation initiative: two new professorships will be established at the University as part of Zentrum Digitalisierung.Bayern (ZD.B), one dedicated to e-health/m-health and one focusing on digital industrial service systems. FAU applied for these two specific professorships with the goal of strengthening collaboration between pure computer science and applied research in medicine and industrial production, thereby ensuring that basic research can be put into practice as quickly as possible. This should allow researchers based in Erlangen and Nuremberg to play a greater role in digital transformation thanks to the increased research capacity.

A professorship of e-health/m-health – electronic and mobile applications in medicine – will be established at FAU as part of a collaboration in the field of digital media. The professorship will be part of the Faculty of Medicine and will focus on reusing healthcare data from hospitals for medical research. In this way, FAU aims to further strengthen its excellent national and international reputation in medical informatics. The overall goal of the ZD.B digital media collaboration, which involves universities across Bavaria, is to use a knowledge-based approach to optimise treatments for individual patients.

To support the collaboration in the field of digital production, FAU will receive a new professorship for digital industrial service systems. FAU has already laid the foundations in this area with its research into automation and close collaboration with regional partners in industry. The new professorship is part of information systems and will focus on the systematic development of software-intensive industrial product service systems. In close collaboration with other new professorships that will be established in Munich and Augsburg, the future professorship will help drive forward digital transformation in industry.

Seven of the twenty new professorships being established as part of the Bavarian initiative will work on the collaborations in the fields of digital medicine and digital production. They will be cutting-edge consortia that will work closely with the corresponding ZD.B platforms in order to drive research in their fields forward and contribute to change.

The 20 new professorships were allocated thematically to various universities on the basis of an academic review and ranking procedure involving a committee of experts led by Prof. Dr. Peter Liggesmeyer, executive director of Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESE and president of Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI e.V.) in Munich.

‘The transformation of our world from analogue to digital is largely taking place in practice. This is why it was so important to us for the new professorships to link in with areas that are actually using new digital methods – such as medicine and industrial production. When we submitted our application we purposefully focused on our existing strengths and the industrial environment that our University is a part of,’ says FAU President Prof. Dr. Joachim Hornegger. ‘The committee’s recommendation confirms the excellent quality of FAU’s research in the fields of medicine and digital production. FAU will make an important contribution to the Bavarian government’s digitalisation initiative with the two new professorships.’

Further information:

Prof. Dr. Kathrin M. Möslein
Phone: +49 911 5302284
kathrin.moeslein@fau.de