3rd international
Summer School AI4MedChem

Artificial Intelligence for Medicinal Chemistry and Drug Design

08.09.2025 - 12.09.2025 in Münster

The Summer School AI4MedChem will provide an introductory course on AI for interested students, PhD students or Post-Docs in the field of Pharmacy, Medicinal Chemistry, Life Sciences or related fields. Starting from an introduction to AI, we will also include this year lectures and practical application on AI-based generative chemistry methods like Reinvent 4 as well as docking and folding using Alphafold3.

The application is now possible here, deadline for the applications is the 4th of May.

The course is intended for participants who are interested in artificial intelligence methods but have no idea about them. The course combines the theoretical aspects in the form of lectures with the practical aspects using Jupyter Notebooks. Importantly, programming experience is not required, since these JuPyter Notebooks make it possible to teach the practical aspects without any prior programming knowledge. We will use our tried and tested notebooks for this course extended with new notebooks on generative chemistry and protein folding (see:  https://doi.org/10.1002/ardp.202200628).

The program is divided into morning and afternoon sessions, each with lectures that cover the theoretical aspects and a hands-on exercise using JuPyter Notebooks. For the practical exercises a personal laptop (or a tablet with keyboard) is needed, but the JuPyter Notebooks and the calculations will be executed on specific university servers. The Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning session are very general introductions into Python and Data Science with focus on other ML techniques. We will start on Tuesday afternoon with the focus on Neural Networks.

An evening lecture with respect to the application of AI in industrial pharmaceutical research and a social event will be held on Wednesday evening. On Thursday participants are invited to give a 5 minute presentation about their own research.

A summary of the most important information:

• Application deadline: 4th of May, apply here.
• This year the fee for the summer school is 50 EUR.
•  For your application, please also enclose a letter of motivation explaining why you would like to take part. If we have more participants than places available, we will make a manual selection based on your background and letter of motivation.
• A personal laptop/tablet is needed (although the JuPyter Notebooks and calculations will be executed on university servers)
• You have to take care of accomodation yourself.
• The Summer School will be located at the Institute of Pharmaceutical and Medicinal Chemistry, Corrensstr. 48, 48149 Münster in collaboration with the Center for Data Science and Complexity.

Don't hesitate to reach out to us at samuel.homberg@uni-muenster.de (please write [AI4MedChem] in the subject line).

FAQ

Will you provide food and drinks?

We will provide coffee and snacks in the afternoon, but won't provide a full lunch. Food is available at the student canteen or a bakery nearby.

How can I get to the Building?

Public transport is available via bus with the closest stations being “Henriette-Son-Straße”, “Mendelstraße” and “P+R Coesfelder Kreuz”, serviced by line 1, 2, 5, 11 and 12, all of which also depart from Münster Central Station as the main train station.

There is free, guarded parking available located at “P+R Coesfelder Kreuz” a 3-minute walk from the event location, however overnight parking is not allowed.

The closest regional airport is Münster-Osnabrück (FMO), well connected via public transport during the day. The closest international airport is “Düsseldorf International (DUS)”. CAVE: There is a second airport in Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf-Weeze (NRN) mostly operated by Ryanair. However, this one is located quite far off and badly connected via public transport!

As a city famous for its bicycle culture, the easiest, most flexible, and most widely used way to get around the city is by bike. If you are in for the real Münster experience, information on where to rent a bike is available here.

Will you provide accomodation?

Unfortunately, it is not possible for us to organize accommodation for this event. However, information on accommodation in Münster is available here, or the pertinent websites.

Our group hosted the 2st international summer school AI4MedChem which took place at our nice Pharmcampus. We used theoretical lectures combined with our available Juyper Notebooks to give 35 participants an introduction to artificial intelligence methods with regard to medicinal chemistry. The participants came from Austria, Cameroon, Costa Rica, France, Germany, Italy, Morocco, Netherlands, Poland, United Kingdom. Besides AI, we also had a nice social evening in a pub, a barbecue and a fantastic evening lecture by Nathan Brown about industrial application of AI and ML in Drug Design.
We will provide this summer school next year again. So, if you missed it, wait for the SUMMER SCHOOL AI4 MEDCHEM in September 2025.

The first international summerschool AI4MedChem took place at the PharmaCampus Münster from 19th to the 22nd of September 2023. The 30 participants from France, Great Britain, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Spain and Germany learned about methods in artificial intelligence for medicinal chemistry and drug discovery.

A comment from the evaluation: "I must say that this is one of the best summer schools I have attended so far. Quality of the notebooks is just excellent & easy to understand. I will highly recommend this school to my collegues."