As part of the Seed4EU+ initiative within the 4EU+ Alliance of European universities, Heidelberg University is coordinating the 2025 edition of the Deep Learning Applications in Life Sciences (DeepLife) course. This Europe-wide program is organized in collaboration with Sorbonne University (Paris), Charles University (Prague), the University of Warsaw, the University of Milan, and Heidelberg University.

DeepLife aims to provide students with foundational and applied knowledge in the rapidly evolving field of deep learning (DL) within biomedicine, focusing mainly on single-cell genomics, protein bioinformatics and biomedical image analysis.

The course features weekly online lectures beginning in late February 2025, culminating in a three-day, in-person hackathon taking place from Friday, May 30th to Sunday, June 1st, 2025 at the Heidelberg University Campus Neuenheimer Feld, hosted at BioQuant (Im Neuenheimer Feld 267) and IPMB (Im Neuenheimer Feld 364).

In April, the organizers published a curated list of hands-on project topics. Teams of approximately four students from each partner university selected a project to work on, with multiple teams potentially working on the same topic in parallel. During the final hackathon in Heidelberg, these teams will collaborate to exchange results, test their models on new data, and prepare a joint project summary.

Each team will present their work during a poster session on Sunday morning, showcasing results in the form of a composite poster. The event fosters cross-institutional collaboration and offers a unique opportunity to apply deep learning techniques to real-world biomedical challenges.

We look forward to welcoming all participants of the DeepLife 2025 Hackathon to Heidelberg!

For more information and details, visit the DeepLife course website: DeepLife.