The Steering Board is the central decision-making body responsible for scientific, strategic, structural, and financial matters of IDEAS.
Key responsibilities
- Develop IDEAS statutes in the first year
- Review and select PhD proposals submitted by PI teams
- Plan the yearly recruitment timeline and number of funded positions
Members
Speaker
PIs
Prof. Dr. Jana Schor
Contact
Leipzig University
Research topics:
Bio-Data Science, Generative AI, Graph Neural Networks, Graph Databases as tool for data integration and analysis, Explainable AI and quantification of uncertainty
Jun.-Prof. Dr. Julia Westermayr
Prof. Dr. Gerik Scheuermann
Prof. Dr. Larysa Baraban
Dr. Michael Bussmann
Contact
HZDR
ScaDS.AI
Research topics:
Laser-plasma interaction for applications in accelerator research, high-energy density physics and laboratory astrophysics. Development of the PIConGPU code for simulating large-scale plasma physics on many-core HPC architectures. Single-source, performance portable manycore software development with Alpaka, high data rate analysis in X-ray imaging with GPUs.
Coordinators
Dr. Sandra Hille
Coordinator IDEAS (UFZ)
Contact
Anne Pidt
Coordinator IDEAS (HZDR)
Contact
Doctoral Representatives
Anastasiia Derzhanskaia
Contact
Research project: Agentic Cancer Care
I am a PhD Researcher at the HIDA Research School IDEAS in Dresden, Germany, with strong research interests in agentic AI, multimodal foundation models, and medical image analysis. My doctoral work applies these technologies to prostate cancer treatment monitoring, aiming to safely tackle overdiagnosis and overtreatment. I built my foundation in medical imaging during my Data Science master's at Philipps-Universität Marburg, where I created AI pipelines to predict surgical interventions from longitudinal MRI data.
I also have deep practical expertise in large language models and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). I applied this by co-developing an open-source conversational agent for student support and actively shared my knowledge through talks on LLM evaluation at the university's reading club.
Beyond research, I am passionate about using AI to solve socially significant problems. I co-founded AIKA, an award-winning startup simplifying complex bureaucratic onboarding with chatbots. Additionally, I co-organized the interdisciplinary, student-run AI-Lab, an initiative that won the 2025 State Teaching Award of Hesse.
Maleeha Hassan
Contact
Research project: TrustSeg
Hi, I’m Maleeha. My doctoral research topic is "Trustworthy AI for Clinical Image Segmentation". I teach AI not only to identify important structures in medical images, but also to admit when it is unsure. By integrating uncertainty quantification methods with image segmentation models, I aim to make AI systems safer, more transparent, and more reliable for clinical use.
I hold a Master’s degree in Molecular Bioengineering from TU Dresden. Before beginning my PhD, I worked as an ML Engineer at HZDR where I gained experience turning machine learning concepts into practical solutions. Outside of research, I swap uncertainty quantification for two things I’m absolutely certain about: my love for good food and dance.