Claus Horn, PhD

As a founding member of the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science Dr. Horn's research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning and biomedical applications.

Before joining BIDS, his research focused on autonomous learning systems with life science applications and he served as director of the extension school at ICLS, which offers data science courses tailored for life science professionals. He is particularly excited about the development of new deep learning techniques for enzyme design, which he is exploring in collaboration with ETH Zurich.

As a dedicated educator, he has been teaching over 300 students in deep learning, reinforcement learning, and artificial intelligence since 2019 and has devised several new courses that have been especially popular with students.

Before re-transitioning to academia in 2020, he pioneered data science in Switzerland and built up the first data science team at Switzerland’s largest company.

In 2018, he founded a platform for open education to foster collaboration between academics and professional data scientists, which has over 3000 members. While working at CERN, he was awarded diplomatic status for coordinating the pixel detector effort at ATLAS, a global collaboration involving over 70 countries. During his postdoc at Stanford University, he was a leading contributor (h-index>100) to searches for supersymmetric particles, microscopic black holes, and the Higgs boson, whose discovery was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2013. In his Ph.D. thesis, he pioneered machine learning in particle physics and developed the first application of machine learning at the petabyte scale.