Complexity researcher Peter Klimek has been named Austrian Scientist of the Year 2021 by the Club of Education and Science Journalists. Klimek is best known for his permanent extrapolations on current developments around Covid 19. He received the award mainly because he was able to communicate complex scientific results to a broad public in an understandable way.

Klimek started his physics studies at the University of Vienna. He wrote his diploma thesis in the field of theoretical quantum information at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW). However, his interest then turned to chaos research. As a PhD student, Klimek signed on with Stefan Thurner, who was also awarded this prize back in 2017. So today he works at the Complexity Science Hub (CSH) Vienna and at the Medical University (MedUni) Vienna. In the research group for complex systems at MedUni, Klimek approached a wide range of research questions. These included work on social problems such as bureaucracy and medical issues. In the latter, Klimek supports the D4Dairy research team when it comes to generating a reliable prediction of animal diseases from a large amount of data.

"With the analysis of the extensive data from the D4Dairy project, we will manage to sustainably improve animal health in particular. In the human field, we have already been able to show how novel methods of data analysis can be used to improve health. In the D4Dairy project, we are trying to explore health-relevant factors and their interactions from all available data, from genetics to feeding to performance data. The added value of combining data and networking with these new technologies is difficult to overestimate. Complex analyses will provide new and comprehensive insights into animal health and welfare as well as new parameters for the early detection of diseases," says Klimek.

The D4Dairy project, under the consortium leadership of ZuchtData EDV-Dienstleistungen GmbH, started in October 2018. With 44 partners from business (31) and science (13), it is probably the most comprehensive digitalisation project in Austrian agriculture to date, with the aim of advancing the further development of new aids for herd management and breeding.