Katja Bühler is Scientific Director of the VRVis Research Center in Vienna, Austria. She studied Mathematics at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and received a doctorate in computer science (Dr.techn.) from TU Wien, Institute of Visual Computing & Human-Centered Technology. In 2002 she started her Career at VRVis as a senior researcher and was promoted to Head of the Biomedical Image Informatics Group in 2003. 2010-2020 she coordinated in addition the research area Complex Systems.

Katja Bühler has many years of experience in developing innovation and research strategies and in leading their implementation as international basic and applied research projects in close cooperation with industry and science at international level. Together with her team she has been dedicated to the development of highly efficient methods to provide access to the information encoded in (biomedical) images and big data in life sciences. Her interdisciplinary group covers deep expertise in image analysis, artificial intelligence and classical machine learning, high-performance computing, data mining, visualization and human-computer interaction to create novel intelligent visual computing solutions for medicine, life sciences and, since recently, also manufacturing. The group’s research results are continuously awarded various scientific prizes and led to several international patents with a strong focus on AI. The highly successful software resulting from the group’s research helps for example radiologists to cope with multi-modal images and diagnostic tasks in their daily clinical routine, allows neuroscientists and cancer biologists to gain insight into highly heterogeneous, high dimensional data and supports the optimization of manufacturing processes. The e-Science platform Brain* co-designed with and used by research institutions in Europe and the US, as well as the pharmaceutical industry addresses the urgent need to manage and use of image-intensive data collections and accelerates image-based and data driven research by neuroscientists.