The Internet will evolve at tremendous speed in the next few years, encompassing more and more areas of our lives. New Internet services and applications will give rise to tighter requirements in terms of network security, dependability, and quality. This will be a necessary step, since the Internet as we know it today is actually teetering on the brink. Scholars like Freie Universität professor of computer science Mesut Güneş are working to ensure that it will be able to withstand this period of rapid development.

It has been almost 30 years since the French virologists Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi first described human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV. Nowadays, highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART) offers a way to extend the lives of those infected with the virus. But so far, it has been impossible to find either a vaccine or a cure-all to treat the virus, which causes AIDS. “It’s frustrating,” says Max von Kleist, but at the same time, this is what motivates his research. And yet, the 32-year-old researcher is neither a doctor nor a pharmacist. “I come from a family of doctors. Maybe that’s what sensitized me to medical topics,” says von Kleist, a Berlin native who first studied bioinformatics at Freie Universität Berlin before earning a doctorate in mathematics at the National University of Ireland. Since last October, von Kleist has been in charge of the Computational Pharmacometrics research group at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Freie Universität Berlin.