Daniel Wiczew from WUST’s Doctoral School has received the prestigious Eiffel Excellence scholarship. The French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs (MEAE - Ministere de l'Europe et des Affaires Étrangeres) awards it to the best students from abroad. Thanks to the grant, the PhD student will go to study at the Université de Lorraine.

Eiffel Excellence, a prestigious scholarship programme for foreigners who want to study in France,  is financed by the Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs, allowing French universities to accept the best candidates from abroad for master’s and doctoral degree programmes.

Scholarship holders are paid a monthly allowance of 1,181 EUR (Master's) or 1,400 EUR (PhD). They also receive funding for return trips, health insurance, and discounts on cultural attractions.

This year MEAE received 1,630 applications. The scholarship was granted to 378 people (320 at the master's level and 58 at the doctoral level),  including three representatives of Poland. One of them is Daniel Wiczew from Wrocław University of Science and Technology.

Our young scientist is currently a first-year student at the newly established Doctoral School of Wrocław University of Science and Technology. He is writing his doctoral thesis in the field of Biomedical Engineering under the supervision of Sebastian Kraszewski, PhD, Dsc, University Professor at the Faculty of Fundamental Problems of Technology.

- In our team, we focus on designing new drugs, which will make it possible to treat the world’s most important diseases of the 21st century - explains Daniel Wiczew. - Using mainly numerical tools, we’re looking for solutions related to the operation of selected molecular mechanisms. One of the main directions of our research is the cell membrane and its transport proteins.

The winner of the French scholarship is a graduate of WUST’s Faculty of Chemistry, where he obtained a diploma in Chemistry and then in Biotechnology (specialisation: bioinformatics). He has three peer-review publications to his credit, two of which were produced in cooperation with Wrocław Medical University.

His main scientific interests include developing machine learning algorithms and applying them for the purposes of drug design as well as explaining the way drugs work. - I also deal with general computational chemistry, i.e. creating models of the microscopic world and drawing various conclusions from the analysis - explains Daniel Wiczew.

Daniel's candidature for the Eiffel Excellence scholarship was submitted by Université de Lorraine, where he was on a placement under the Erasmus+ programme two years ago. - The application included my achievements in terms of publishing papers, a description of my academic activities, and the details of the project I will be carrying out during my stay in France under Eiffel Excellence. At the same time, the project had to be a part of my doctoral thesis, in line with the idea of a double degree (French: cotutelle) - explains Daniel Wiczew.

In his project, our young researcher focuses on the use of reinforced learning to predict the behaviour of proteins in the cell membrane. This may allow us to establish the influence of mutation on a given protein’s action, e.g. to explain the occurrence of the Brugada syndrome (a rare genetic heart disease), or a given drug’s lack of action on a specific protein.

- Reinforced teaching belongs to the area of machine learning, and its methods are widely used in artificial intelligence - explains Daniel Wiczew. - AlphaGo, a well-known program based on reinforced learning, is a good example. It managed to defeat several world champions by competing with them in the popular board game Go.

Due to the current world pandemic, Daniel Wiczew does not yet know when he will leave for France. According to the regulations of the Eiffel Excellence scholarship, he should present himself at Université de Lorraine in the winter semester of the academic year 2020/21.