Machine Learning in Medicine: A Research Stay in Switzerland

Hertie AI PhD student Julius Gervelmeyer recently spent three months as a visiting researcher in the Machine Learning in Medicine lab led by Lisa Koch in Bern, Switzerland.
Lisa Koch is a former subgroup leader at the Hertie AI focussing on medical image analysis. She is now a Tenure Track Professor in Bern.

Her lab is part of the University Department of Diabetes, Endocrinology, Nutritional Medicine, and Metabolism at the Inselspital, Bern's university hospital, and develops safe and trustworthy AI for diabetes care. Her research centers on the interpretability, robustness and generalization of machine learning models in the clinical context. These topics are in excellent synergy with Julius's PhD, in which he works on medical image analysis, with the goal of building reliable methods that support clinicians and, ultimately, benefit patients.

Beyond the science, the stay was also really enriching. Seeing how another research group works, and how scientists live elsewhere, was interesting, and the cultural differences between Germany and Switzerland proved more noticeable than expected. A reminder that working and doing science in another country always also opens up new perspectives.

Julius says: “I can warmly recommend such an experience to other PhD students. I want to say a huge thank you to the whole Koch lab  and the University of Bern for the warm welcome, to my supervisor Philipp Berens, and the Cluster of Excellence Cluster Machine Learning for Science for making this stay possible.”