Marcel Giemsa
Position: Work Package 6
Who am I & what do I do?
My name is Marcel Giemsa, and I work as a Research Associate at the Department of Cardiology, Pulmonology and Angiology at the University Hospital Düsseldorf, in the group of Prof. Dr. Dr. med. Christian Jung. I hold a Bachelor’s degree in Biology from Ruhr University Bochum, and this summer I will complete a second Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. I originally joined Christian’s group as a student assistant, and after some time he asked me whether I would like to take on a larger role within the team — which is how I ended up working on INDICATE.
What am I up to during INDICATE?
Within INDICATE, I am responsible for the coordination of Work Package 6 and take on technical coordination tasks across the project. This includes a fair amount of hands-on project management, as well as supporting data analysis activities. A core part of my role is acting as a bridge between the clinical and the technical domains: translating clinical requirements into technical specifications, and making sure that the technical work stays aligned with the real-world needs of the ICUs and clinicians we serve. Because WP6 sits at the intersection of so many topics, a lot of my day-to-day work is about keeping the different threads connected and making sure information flows between the people who need it.
What motivates me to be part of INDICATE?
Combining medicine and IT has been something I wanted to do for as long as I can remember. It is the reason I studied both Biology and Computer Science in the first place. Working with Prof. Jung has been a great experience from day one: we quickly realized that our backgrounds complement each other well, and there is a lot of mutual trust in what each of us brings to the table. On top of that, AI in medicine is a field I find genuinely exciting, and at the same time one of the hardest when it comes to getting access to high-quality data. INDICATE tackles exactly that bottleneck, and being able to contribute to a project that works on this problem at a European scale is a rare opportunity that I didn’t want to miss.
What do I expect to accomplish within INDICATE?
On a personal level, my main goal is to deeply understand how a large EU project like INDICATE is structured — from governance and reporting to the technical coordination between dozens of partners — and to learn which pitfalls tend to come up along the way. EU projects are complex, and a lot of the knowledge about how to run them well is experience-based. I want to build exactly that kind of experience, so that in future EU projects I can help avoid problems before they occur and contribute from an even stronger starting position. Beyond that, I hope to see WP6 deliver results that genuinely support the wider project and the clinicians and researchers who will eventually work with the INDICATE infrastructure.
How does my background or expertise contribute to the goals of INDICATE?
My dual background is what I try to bring into the project every day. From Biology, I bring scientific working practices and an understanding of biological and medical processes, which helps me engage meaningfully with clinical partners and the use cases we are building around. From Computer Science, I bring a solid foundation in machine learning and in thinking about data and systems. In a project like INDICATE, where clinicians, data scientists, engineers, and ML researchers all need to work together, the biggest challenge is often not the individual disciplines but the communication between them. Because I know both “camps” from the inside, I can translate between them, ask the right questions on either side, and help make sure that technical decisions respect clinical reality — and vice versa. That is the contribution I try to make within INDICATE.
