Congratulations to CeMM PI Georg Winter for becoming the Scientific Director Life Sciences of AITHYRA, the new Research Institute for Biomedical Artificial Intelligence of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His work in targeted protein degradation is not only advancing fundamental research but also paving the way for practical applications. Together with Michael Bronstein, Scientific Director AI and Anita Ender, Managing Director, the leadership team of AITHYRA is completed. 

Georg Winter has emerged as the best applicant in a highly competitive recruiting process. The international hiring committee was chaired by Maria Leptin.

One of the most telling facts about the quality of CeMM is that our Principal Investigators, typically hired straight from postdoctoral positions, keep moving on to important leadership positions. In the past years, several CeMM PIs have become directors of new institutes and departments, such as Andreas Bergthaler who became Head of the Institute for Hygiene and Applied Immunology of the Medical University of Vienna or Christoph Bock, who became Head of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support of the Medical University of Vienna. Jörg Menche, Adjunct PI at CeMM, Professor and group leader at the Max Perutz Labs of the University of Vienna and the Medical University assumed the directorship of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Network Medicine, and Adjunct PI Miriam Unterlass became Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Silicate Research in Würzburg. 

Georg Winter obtained his PhD from the Medical University of Vienna, working on elucidating the mechanism of action of anti-neoplastic drugs under the supervision of Giulio Superti-Furga at CeMM. He specialized in proteomics as well as chemical genetic approaches to identifying drug resistance mechanisms and on mechanistically elucidating synergistic drug combinations. He continued his training in chemical biology, working as a postdoctoral fellow with James Bradner at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute/Harvard Medical School. There, he innovated a generalizable pharmacological solution to in vivo target protein degradation and applied this strategy to the study of leukemic gene regulation. Georg Winter was recruited as CeMM Principal Investigator in June 2016. His lab developed and applied methods for target protein degradation with the ultimate goal of understanding and disrupting oncogenic transcriptional circuits. The Winter laboratory combines phenotypic drug screens, chemical genetics, and drug-target identification approaches with holistic measurements of global gene activity and genome structure. Georg Winter’s contributions to the field of targeted protein degradation were acknowledged via multiple prices and awards, including the Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award, the EFMC Prize for Young Chemical Biologist in Academia, the German Lectureship for Chemical Biology, the Wilson S. Stone Memorial Award from MD Anderson, the Eppendorf Award for European Scientists, and the Elisabeth Lutz Award of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

With the founding of AITHYRA last September, the Austrian Academy of Sciences further expanded its life science focus. The Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation is funding the institute with 150 million euros, the largest private research grant ever received in Austria. In February 2025, AITHYRA moved into its first laboratory and office space in the Marxbox at the Vienna BioCenter. In cooperation with the Vienna Business Agency, a new, jointly developed research building will be built by 2029. 

Our heartfelt congratulations to Georg and his team, we wish them all the best for the exciting new endeavors! This is not a goodbye, it is a great step forward into the scientific career.