December 10, 2025; Christina Warren

Congratulations to Sabrina Jaeger-Honz (D04)! She received the Airbus Research Award "Claude Dornier" for her dissertation "Combining Bio- and Cheminformatics for Small Data Sets: Microcystins as a Use Case". Since 1989, Airbus Defence and Space has been promoting young scientists at the University of Konstanz with this award at its Friedrichshafen site. The prize money of €6000 is awarded for outstanding doctoral theses in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, and economics.

Using computational methods, Sabrina's thesis presents multiple interconnected approaches in order to overcome difficulties associated with studying small datasets in bio- and cheminformatics. At the award ceremony, Falk Schreiber, vice speaker of the SFB-TRR 161, highlighted the broad practical applicability of Sabrina's findings: "In her work, [she] engages intensively with the development and application of models that help predict the properties of substances for which hardly any data is available. For example, the method is being used to estimate the effectiveness and side effects of new types of antibiotics. Thanks to those models, time-consuming and costly tests can often be skipped in favor of informed predictions." 

Dissertation

S. Jaeger Honz. "Combining Bio- and Cheminformatics for Small Data Sets: Microcystins as a Use Case," Doctoral thesis, Dept. of Comp. and Inf. Sci., Uni. Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany, 2023 [Online]. Available: https://kops.uni-konstanz.de/entities/publication/392bfe23-4060-4157-b7dd-9030fc533b10