Background

Medicine and health care are currently undergoing substantial changes. Advances in molecular life science, biomedical sciences and engineering have significantly influenced diagnostic and therapeutic options. Furthermore, demographic and socio-cultural changes, together with increasing costs of diagnostic and therapeutic procedures, have put our health systems under severe pressures.

In this transition process, a key role has emerged for information science in health, as it is part of the whole health sector providing scientific methodology, key applications and the pioneering of new services. Due to these substantial changes, we believe that further progress in health requires the input of both biosciences and information science. These two fields, which have traditionally been separate, need to cooperate much more closely and exchange data and knowledge ? multidisciplinarity has become essential!

GSISH's vision is to respond to these challenges by educating a new generation of uniquely trained scientists. The GSISH graduate will be able to understand the scientific culture of other disciplines beside his/her own, and due to the early multidisciplinary training, he/she will be able to bridge those cultural gaps.

To this end, GSISH will set up interdisciplinary project groups. These project groups are being hosted by renowned research institutions in Munich. They consist of one PhD student, complemented by at least one more researcher from one of the host institutions. The project supervisors come from two (or more) different disciplines so as to ensure that the research work is relevant to all these disciplines. Our international faculty will play a key role in the PhD research work of our students. They will supervise the students during visits to Munich, and ? if suitable ? GSISH students may visit their research institutions for a short research stay. This will be done via short-term internships funded by GSISH.