Giersch International Conference Sep 15-17, 2025 postponed to March 2-6 2026
The Role of Digital Twins for Life Sciences
Important note: the Giersch International Conference has been postponed to 2–6 March 2026. The conference will be extended to a 5-day event and will also be a kickoff event for the recently approved Cluster of Excellence SCALE at Goethe University. In SCALE, digital twins are a key technology, and the development of digital twins for cellular segments is one of the targets.
Further information will follow shortly
Criteria, Chances, and Challenges
Originally emerging from industry and engineering, digital twins now set out to enter the field of natural sciences. With their aim to offer real interrogability akin to true experimental conditions, but with much higher controllability and reproducibility, digital twins promise to overcome existing experimental frontiers and to facilitate mechanistic insights to both theorists and experimentalists. The ongoing integration of classical simulation techniques and more recent AI-based approaches further enhances these innovative opportunities.
However, creating digital twins of natural systems is challenging due to their inherent complexity and stochasticity. Unlike in industrial applications, where components are well characterized, the structure and function of natural system components often is hardly known and itself subject to investigation. Moreover, creation of numerically efficient digital twins requires careful, system-specific abstraction of natural complexity while retaining mechanistic interrogability. These difficulties call for new approaches and thorough balancing of existing methodology.
This conference will bring together leading theorists, computational experts and data scientists engaging in digital twin development at vastly different scales, ranging from cell compartments and tissues to neural systems and organism scales. It will identify common challenges and concepts in digital twin implementation and attempt to establish a catalog of criteria for creating high-quality digital twins for life sciences.
Topical Sessions:
- Digital Twins of neural systems
- Digital Twins of multicellular systems
- Digital Twins of subcellular systems
- Digital Twin for medical applications
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Computational approaches for Digital Twins