معرفی
Ole Winther is a Professor at the Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen, specializing in Computational and RNA Biology. He also holds a joint appointment as Professor at DTU Compute, Technical University of Denmark. His research bridges machine learning, bioinformatics, and natural language processing with applications in biological sequence analysis, transcriptomics, and health informatics.
Education:
- 1998: PhD in Physics, University of Copenhagen
- 1994: Master of Science in Physics, University of Copenhagen
Winther's research focuses on developing advanced machine learning methodologies for biological applications. He has pioneered protein language models for sequence analysis (DeepLoc, SignalP, DeepTMHMM), interpretable deep learning for RNA subcellular localization, and benchmarking frameworks for DNA language models. His work spans latent variable models, variational inference, diffusion models, and novel architectures for deep generative modeling, with increasing emphasis on practical healthcare applications including rare disease diagnosis through findzebra.com and medical question answering with large language models.
Scientific Recognition:
- ELLIS Fellow (2021)
- Head of ELLIS Copenhagen Unit
- H-index of 61 (Google Scholar, May 2023)
- 19,700+ citations (Google Scholar, May 2023)
Winther has supervised 25+ PhD students to completion with 7 currently in progress, along with over 100 master's projects. He frequently serves as PhD opponent and committee chairman across European institutions. His research is supported by substantial funding including multiple Novo Nordisk Foundation grants totaling over 60 million DKK for the Center for Basic Machine Learning Research in Life Science and CAZAI projects, plus significant funding from the Danish Independent Research Fund.
He leads an active research group developing cutting-edge machine learning approaches for bioinformatics and NLP challenges. Winther co-founded two spin-out companies: findzebra.com (2014, 2018), a search engine for rare diseases, and raffle.ai, an NLP startup for enterprise search. He initiated DTU's popular BSc in AI and Data program and teaches the highly enrolled MSc course in Deep Learning (450+ students) and PhD course in Bayesian Data Analysis.
