Dear CPDSE in 2026 - this is how the future looks in 2035
Pharma students today know what it feels like to work with real data on real problems. From their first semester they have been building, failing, iterating and learning. They leave university with portfolios that show what they can actually do, a deep understanding of how data shapes every part of the medicines lifecycle, and the confidence to contribute wherever their pharma career takes them. At the end of every dataset, every model and every curriculum decision, there is a patient. That is what makes the work matter. Data science is part of the toolkit, not a subject on the side. Domain knowledge has not been crowded out. It has been made more powerful by the ability to work with data. Graduates are fluent in both.
Teaching has changed too. Teachers across UCPH and SDU act more as supervisors than lecturers, following the energy and building from genuine enthusiasm rather than mandating change from above. They work in networks where pharma expertise and data science expertise meet and understand each other. Courses are designed with flexibility to meet students where they are, balancing problem based learning with the fundamentals. How you teach data science in a pharma context has become a discipline in its own right. What holds all of this together is an intentional cultural shift. CPDSE has become the natural meeting point for teachers, students, researchers and the pharma industry, a community built around data science and pharma together, strong enough to prevent fragmentation even at the level of individual course teams. Belonging is designed in, not left to chance. No one learns alone because we built it that way. The questions about AI are not just open. They are urgent. What we are building is the domain grounded judgment that makes it possible to work with AI well: to know what a model is actually doing, to recognise where it fails, and to take responsibility for the decisions it informs.
“Medicines are made by people who understand data. We build a community flexible enough to keep up with the world and connected enough that no one gets left behind.”
With ambition, CPDSE
We (Albert, Stefan, Sarah, Sebastian, Tommy, Morten and Lykke) wrote a postcard to ourselves, ten years from now. The shared postcard is what you can read above.