Directors

The scientific founding director, Professor Michael Bronstein, will bring world-leading expertise in developing novel machine learning technique for biological applications as well as a track record of research commercialization and technological spinoffs and industrial experience.

Michael Bronstein is the DeepMind Professor of AI at the University of Oxford. His research interests lie in geometric deep learning, graph neural networks, 3D shape analysis, protein design, non-human species communication. Michael Bronstein was previously Head of Graph Learning Research at Twitter, a Professor at Imperial College London and held visiting appointments at Stanford, MIT, and Harvard. Michael Bronstein received his PhD from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology in 2007. He is the recipient of the EPSRC Turing AI World Leading Research Fellowship, Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal, five ERC grants, two Google Faculty Research Awards, and two Amazon AWS ML Research Awards. He is a Member of the Academia Europaea, Fellow of IEEE, IAPR, BCS, and ELLIS, ACM Distinguished Speaker, and World Economic Forum Young Scientist. In addition to his academic career, Michael Bronstein is a serial entrepreneur and founder of multiple startup companies, including Novafora, Invision (acquired by Intel in 2012), Videocites, and Fabula AI (acquired by Twitter in 2019).

The administrative director and CEO of AITHYRA, Anita Ender is well grounded in human resources and management skills. Since 2014 Anita Ender has been the Administrative Director and CEO of CeMM, the Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences leading a team of 35 administrative and scientific support members. She played a major role in building up the institute, being a highly considered dialogue partner for the Scientific Director and Faculty. Anita Ender was elected Board Member of the conference of the 26 institute directors of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Chair of the Board of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Rare and Undiagnosed Diseases in Vienna, recently became Board Member of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Network Medicine and is part of the Strategy Group of EU-LIFE, an alliance of 15 Top Life Science institutes in Europe, as well as an Evaluation Board Member of CERCA Research Centers of Catalonia.