Dr. Hans Binder graduated in Biophysics (Diploma) and received his PhD about “computer experiments on lipid membranes” (the terminology used for structural bioinformatics in the 80ties) 1985 at the Physics Department of the University of Leipzig which dealt with methodical developments and applications of Molecular Dynamics and Monte Carlo calculations in molecular and statistical biophysics. As postdoc he became lab-head for optical spectroscopy and calorimetry at the Physics department of the University of Leipzig. Hans Binder worked until 2000 in the fields of time-resolved fluorescence and infrared spectroscopy, x-ray diffraction and isothermal titration calorimetry and their applications in molecular biophysics of lipid membranes. His team invented ground-breaking technologies such as hydration-tuned infrared spectroscopy and humidity titration calorimetry. He received his habilitation for thesis “Infrared linear dichroism of molecular ordered systems” which combined state-of the art nanotechnological methods, molecular biophysics and computational data analytics and afterwards became adjunct professor in experimental physics. During this stage of his vitae he also worked as visiting scientist in Prague (Charles University), US (NIH) and Umea University (Sweden).

In 2001 Hans Binder was appointed as founding managing director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Bioinformatics (IZBI) which was established as a central research unit at the University of Leipzig for developing research and education in genome bioinformatics. In the following years he was Principal Investigator of Bioinformatics and systems biology projects in numerous consortial studies dealing with different cancer entities (among them the International Cancer Genome Consortium, German Glioma Network and German Lymphoma Alliance), other diseases such as Community Acquired Pneumonia, and LIFE, a large-scale health study of the population of Leipzig. In the last years his group deals with single cell omics studies on cancer and immune and stroma cell populations. Under methodical aspects his group (https://www.izbi.uni-leipzig.de/science/research-groups/binder/) developed analysis pipelines for high dimensional omics and phenotype data in systems biology settings using machine learning and statistical approaches. Hans Binder co-authored about 300 scientific publications, about them more than five in NATURE.

Hans Binder and his group intensively cooperates with the Institute of Molecular Biology NA RA for more than ten years with regular annual staff exchanges, joint super-visions of PhD and capstone theses. With more than 25 joint scientific publications until now this international cooperation is one of the most productive ones in Armenia. He was awarded as honorary doctor of the Slavonic-Armenian University 2022 and took over group leadership and chairman responsibilities of the Board of Trustees at the Armenian Bioinformatics Institute in 2021 (https://abi.am/research/research-labs/binder-lab/).