COMSYS Researcher Jan Pennekamp joins the RWTH's CCLS

Jan Pennekamp is now an official Center for Computational Life Sciences (CCLS) member. In the healthcare domain, our interdisciplinary research contributions explore topics such as medical data interoperability, novel approaches to informed consent, security concepts for confidentiality in multimodal datasets, implications of applying machine learning on patient data, and opportunities and challenges associated with synthetic data.

His membership improves COMSYS’s interdisciplinary link to biomedicine as well as the RWTH Aachen University Hospital (UKA). Moreover, it strengthens our medical data (privacy) activities, including prior teaching offerings, and aligns nicely with the efforts that Jan started as part of his KT Boost Fund 2025. By connecting computer science with life sciences and clinical practice, the collaboration aims to advance trustworthy, privacy-preserving data use for research and (personalized) patient care.

The vision of the RWTH Center for Computational Life Sciences (CCLS) is to (i) open new routes in research in life sciences and medicine systematically exploiting next-generation computational sciences and (ii) to stimulate new developments in computational sciences in response to the demands of modern life science applications, as illustrated in its videographic introduction. It provides a dynamic scientific network, connecting experts across RWTH Aachen, UKA, and other partners. In the past, COMSYS researchers have already contributed to CCLS’s Cycle of Innovation.

We look forward to seeing the first outcomes of this close collaboration!