New and leaving faces

Veronica Haritonova, Julius Martensen, and Darya Shaydurova joined our group as PhD students during the year 2020. Veronica will work on inverse optimal control, Julius on scientific machine learning, and Darya on monomial pattern methodology for optimal control. Welcome!

Dr. Felix Jost finished his PhD thesis on Model-based optimal treatment schedules for acute leukemia. He developed several mathematical models for the interplay between chemotherapy, healthy cells, immune system, and blasts in acute myeloid leukemia and in acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The differential equation models were developed, analyzed using advanced methods of parameter estimation, experimental design, uncertainty quantification, sensitivity analysis. For AML we used them to calculate personalized and mathematically optimal treatment plans, see Jost et al., Model-based optimal AML consolidation treatment, 2021. As a main result, the new approach can (in-silico) avoid 90% of occuring leukopenias without impairing the long term effect on the cancerous cells.

Xiangzhong Xie investigated in his dissertation with the title Sensitivity Analysis and Robust Design of Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Processes the performance of various strategies to quantify the sensitivity of computational results with respect to model parameters, and to use them in the context of robust control strategies. His first advisor was Ulrike Klewer, TU Braunschweig. Bastian Radloff successfully defended his Master thesis on Transformer-Models for Multilabel Topic Classification of Global Development News, a joint project with Devex, Barcelona.

SIGOPT 2020

Events and Conferences

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic many events had to be cancelled or substituted by online workshops. An exception was the SIGOPT 2020 conference in Dortmund. In addition, Sebastian gave survey talks in the mathematical colloquium in Potsdam and at the Data Science Day at Volkswagen, Wolfsburg.