International PhD Programme

A consortium of scientists at Boku University Vienna has won long-term funding of about €1 mio per year for an international PhD programme at the interface of basic science and applications in the fields of protein biotechnology.

Programme faculty – bioinformatics

David Kreil has won a WWTF Chair of Bioinformatics in 2005 as well as a joint full professorship at Warwick University 2012. His Research Group joined the Department of Biotechnology in 2014, and the newly founded Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in 2019. His current research focus is the development of computational and quantitative experimental methods for the investigation of complex biological questions. These can be hard to examine using traditional gene-by-gene approaches alone because of the redundancies and complex interactions commonly found in modern eukaryotes. In contrast, he and his team work on integrated profile analysis that exploits complementary data sources. His interdisciplinary unit combines a modern genomics laboratory and a strong computational group. Together they can draw on extensive expertise in microarray design and hybridization, systems for the integration of heterogeneous databases and bioinformatics tools, like sequence analysis and comparative genomics, as well as probabilistic and statistical methods. The group has standing collaborations with the University of Cambridge as well as leading groups at Boku and other local institutes (such as the GMI, IMP/IMBA, or at the Technical University).

Recent projects

1. Joint modelling of gene expression patterns and regulatory potential of genome sequence regions for sensitive process identification (not assigned)
2. Modelling of interactions in miRNA and gene expression, and target validation (assigned)