Andrea Volkamer new professor for Data Driven Drug Development
The Saarland Minister of Finance and Science, Jakob von Weizsäcker, presented Andrea Volkmar with the certificate of appointment as professor at Saarland University.
Dr. Andrea Volkamer, currently an assistant professor at Charité in Berlin, received her certificate of appointment as a university professor at the Ministry of Finance and Science on July 29, 2022.
Andrea Volkamer studied bioinformatics at Saarland University, followed by a one-year research stay at Purdue University (USA). After her PhD at the University of Hamburg, she worked at the BioMedX Innovation Center Heidelberg as a PostDoc on methods for the development of selective kinase inhibitors. Since 2016, she has been leading a research group for structural bioinformatics and in silico toxicology at the Institute of Physiology at Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin as an assistant professor.
Andrea Volkamer’s scientific focus is on method development with a particular interest in structure-based machine learning approaches for computational drug design. The application focus so far is in the areas of cancer research and risk assessment of new molecules (alternative to animal testing). She does so by exploiting the rapidly growing amount of available experimental data – increasingly complemented by synthetic data, as well as powerful computational algorithms – to develop in silico methods that support the drug design process.
Andrea Volkamer is a strong advocate of FAIR science and supports many open source initiatives. In this context, for example, her public teaching materials TeachOpenCADD and Dr. med. AI are worth mentioning, as well as her contributions to the Covid Moonshot Consortium.
At Saarland University, Andrea Volkamer will conduct research at the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, as well as the Center for Bioinformatics, the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS), and Saarland University Hospital. Her work will continue to focus on the development of novel structural and ligand-based computational methods – with a focus on machine learning approaches and artificial intelligence – to improve the mechanistic understanding of biochemical processes and advance the drug design process.
Andrea Volkamer will start her service as professor at Saarland University on August 1, 2022.