Science Award Award for Heidelberg Data Scientist
16 October 2025
The Early Excellence in Science Award goes to Britta Velten for innovative procedures in the analysis of complex data sets from the life sciences
Her ground-breaking research studies in the fields of machine learning and data science have earned Junior Professor Dr Britta Velten the Bayer Foundation’s Early Excellence in Science Award. With this award, the foundation honors research talents worldwide for pioneering performance in their field. Prof. Velten develops innovative methods enabling the analysis of complex molecular data sets from the life sciences. Her Emmy Noether junior research group is based at the Centre for Organismal Studies and the Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing of Heidelberg University. The award comes with 10,000 euros in prize money.
Using novel research methods and technologies, scientists can examine biological processes on an unprecedented scale and with high resolution. That gives rise to huge quantities of different data containing information about various biological aspects of an organism. With her team, Prof. Velten works on innovative methods of analysis and modelling of such multi-omics data in order to decode organismic function, development, and adaptability, for example, and to gain a holistic understanding of underlying molecular mechanisms. To do so, the scientist uses special statistical methods as well as new approaches from machine learning. In its statement announcing this year’s Early Excellence in Science Award, the Bayer Foundation notes that the tools developed by Britta Velten have already enabled new insights into genetic developmental programs, disease progression and tissue architecture. Prof. Velten’s award falls in the Data Science category.
Britta Velten completed her bachelor and master’s degrees in mathematics at Heidelberg University. In 2019 she earned her doctorate in the field of statistics at ETH Zurich (Switzerland) and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg. Before her appointment in May 2023 to a tenure-track professorship for multifactorial data analysis and machine learning in the life sciences at Heidelberg University, she did postdoctoral research at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg and the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge (United Kingdom).
With the Early Excellence in Science Award, the Bayer Foundation each year honors research achievements by outstanding early career researchers in the categories Biology, Chemistry, Data Science and Medicine. The award ceremony for 2026 will take place in Leverkusen in spring.