CLIB General Assembly and Networking Day 2025
On October 6, CLIB was a guest at the University House of the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf to hold the cluster’s 6th Networking Day and the annual general assembly.
About 80 participants gathered in the Haus der Universität and used the venue according to its purpose: to promote exchange between science, business and society.
The day began with the association’s annual general assembly, which was opened by CLIB Chairman Dr. Roland Breves and Prof. Jörg Pietruszka as representative of Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. Professor Pietruszka, who has been active in the network since the CLIB Graduate Cluster, drew a line from the founding of the association to today’s strategic orientation and welcomed the participants to the Haus der Universität. Roland Breves briefly looked back on the past year before handing over to cluster manager Dennis Herzberg, who led through the rest of the general assembly. He and the CLIB team presented the activities and development of the last 12 months and gave an outlook on the upcoming projects and activities in 2026.
As part of the regular election of the Extended Board, the previous board members were confirmed in office. There was a change in the representation of NRW.Bank: Maximilian Erb succeeded Dr. Class Heise, who has been a member of the Extended Board since 2009. As Investment Director in the Venture Capital Team of NRW.Bank, Maximilian Erb is responsible for the field of biotechnology, among other high-tech areas. The team of the office and the rest of the board thanked Dr. Heise for his many years of commitment and warmly welcomed his successor to the Extended Board.
After a joint lunch, the Networking Day was opened in the early afternoon by Dr. Roland Breves and Prof. Jörg Pietruszka. Prof. Dr. Holger Gohlke, Head of the Structure-Based Bioinformatics Division at the Institute of Bio- and Geosciences at Forschungszentrum Jülich, then gave a keynote speech on the topic of “Molecular Bioinformatics – from Enzyme to Agrosphere”. Here, he impressively demonstrated how AI models – provided they are correctly trained and specifically adapted to the respective purpose – make helpful predictions in the annotation and function of new enzymes and how they can greatly accelerate the optimization of enzymes.
Afterwards – interrupted by extensive networking breaks – twelve member organisations were able to introduce themselves on stage. This year, the following presented their work:
- Aminoverse
- Bayer AG
- BCNP Consulting
- Carpus+Partner
- Ceresana
- de. NBI & ELIXIR Germany
- MicroHarvest
- Ruhr University Bochum
- Scalable IP
- StartupLabor Schwedt
- Wageningen University and Research
- Tasseikan
These short presentations by the members formed the crystallization seed for the networking breaks, in which not only many interesting conversations were held, but the participants also used the CLIB network net – an extension of the traditional networking board, in which existing connections between members and their expertise were made visible and new ones were made.
We would like to thank everyone who participated in this year’s CLIB Networking Day, especially our speakers for the many insights and Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf for their support and hospitality. The presentations shown will be made available to CLIB members afterwards.
