Professor of Biomedical Network Science at FAU

My name is David Blumenthal and I'm professor for Biomedical Network Science at FAU.

I've discovered my passion for research in science pretty early on during my studies.

I started studying philosophy and then I moved to mathematics from there to computer science where I did my PhD.

And then during my PhD I read a couple of papers on bioinformatics which I found absolutely fascinating

because computational approaches were applied to real biological questions

and that's how I got into the field, then did a postdoc there and that's where I stayed.

So we do research on AI models and algorithms to understand molecular mechanisms that drive complex diseases.

In many diseases we actually don't really know what's going on on a molecular level, so people get diagnosed with hypertension.

But then, I mean, this is only a symptom and very often we don't really know what's causing these symptoms.

So what we're doing is we try to develop computational techniques that elucidate such so far unknown mechanisms

starting with different types of molecular data.

Once we have understood such mechanisms, the next question is of course what to do with it.

And here my dream would be to really bring our understanding of such mechanisms into clinical care

and then be able to better treat patients not only symptomatically

but based on their underlying causal mechanisms which actually cause their symptoms and their diseases.

And FAU is a great environment for that because we have the strong university hospital here

and also the technical faculty in our department, the department either sits between those two.

So we are really in the right spot to achieve this kind of translation into clinical care.