How often a scientist's scientific work is cited by peers is considered a measure of his or her influence on the respective field. This year's list of the world's most cited researchers lists 6,938 people from around 70 nations and regions, 369 of them from Germany. Twenty-one disciplines from medicine, the natural sciences, economics and the social sciences were analyzed. The ranking also lists people who are active at the intersection of several disciplines ("cross-field"). Roland Eils is listed in precisely this area.
Prof. Dr. Roland Eils is the founding director of the Digital Health Center of the Berlin Institute of Health at the Charité (BIH). The expert in biomedical informatics uses artificial intelligence to analyze large data sets in order to improve the diagnosis of diseases and better tailor therapies to individual patients. He is advancing digital medicine within large national and international research consortia. In the four research groups at BIH, he focuses on artificial intelligence, computational cancer research, health data for disease prediction, and analysis of large medical data sets (medical omics).
Recent successes of his BIH team have been in researching Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus infection, including finding out which cells the virus affects, why children are less severely ill with COVID-19, and launching a clinical trial to protect COVID-19 patients from the immune system's exaggerated response. The studies have been published in high-impact journals such as Nature Medicine, Nature Biotechnology and EMBO Journal.
Roland Eils is also an honorary professor at the University of Heidelberg and a member of the Leopoldina German Academy of Sciences.