Commerzbank Dissertation Award for Ph.D. Ali Al-Fatlawi

For his dissertation titled “AI Improves Cancer Biomarker Discovery and Enables Remote Homology Inference,” Ph.D. Ali Al-Fatlawi was awarded the 2026 Dissertation Prize from the Commerzbank Dresden Cultural Foundation.

The thesis examines the use of artificial intelligence to improve cancer diagnostics and to uncover evolutionary relationships between distantly related proteins. By combining clinical and genomic biomarkers with network-based algorithms, diagnostic models were developed that distinguish pancreatic cancer from pancreatitis with up to 96 percent accuracy and enable cross-cancer signatures.

Dr. Al-Fatlawi earned his Ph.D. with honors from the Faculty of Computer Science at TU Dresden and published extensively as a doctoral student, including seven papers as first author. Of particular note is his highly acclaimed article in *Nature Communications* on AI-assisted protein structure analysis.

With its dissertation awards, the Commerzbank Dresden Cultural Foundation honors exceptional work by young researchers at TU Dresden. Among the recipients is Dr. Philipp Peslalz from the Faculty of Chemistry and Food Chemistry for his dissertation “Computer-Aided Design and Synthesis of Type-B PPAPs as Multifunctional Biologically Active Compounds.” The Future Prize in Business goes to Dr. My Hanh Doan of the Faculty of Business and Economics for his dissertation “Corporate Sustainability Management and Corporate Sustainability Performance: Empirical Evidence from Reporting Practices.”

We warmly congratulate all the award recipients on this special honor and wish them every success in their future academic and professional careers!