As a card-carrying bioinformatician I strongly believe in the importance of the computational component in biological and biomedical research. Throughout my scientific career I have participated in a diversity of research projects in a variety of research fields:
For my B.Sc. thesis at Freie Universitàt Berlin, I studied host-pathogen co-evolution between an Australian rabbit population and the Rabbit Haemorrhagic Disease (RHD) virus by performing a genome-wide association study (GWAS) using the DNA of 81 rabbits.
In my M.Sc. project at Robert Koch Institute Berlin, I de-novo assembled and annotated the genome and transcriptome of the pathogenic amoeba Balamuthia mandrillaris.
During my Ph.D. project I simulated heterogeneous tumor genomes containing several sub-populations (clones) of tumor cells and used the simulated bulk sequencing data to benchmark bioinformatic tools for the study of intra-tumor genomic heterogeneity (ITH). These benchmarks included tools for both somatic variant detection and clonal deconvolution.
In Robert Waterhouse’s group I am participating in the development of new bioinformatics resources and tools to 1) automatically extract information from research articles using natural language processing (NLP), as well as 2) the Arthropoda Assembly Assessment Catalog (A3Cat) and 3) gene ontology annotation and visualization tool CrowdGO, which are both hosted by the Waterhouse lab.
I am excited to continue contributing my computational expertise to the analysis, organization, and visualization of biological data in order to discover answers about the fascinating diversity of living things that exist - from amoebas to humans.
2022 - present
Post-doc in Robert Waterhouse’s lab at UNIL, working on the automatic extraction of information from research articles, and the further development of the A3Cat and GrowdGO tools provided by the lab.
2021 - 2022
Post-doc in Bernhard Renard’s group at Hasso Plattner Institute (Potsdam, Germany), setting up a spin-off business in the field of molecular diagnostics using nanopore (ONT) sequencing.
2015 - 2021
Ph.D. on “Computational assessment of methods for inferring intratumoral genomic heterogeneity” with David Posada at Universidade de Vigo (Spain).
2013 - 2015
Master in Bioinformatics at Freie Universität Berlin (Germany). M.Sc. thesis with Bernhard Renard at Robert Koch Institute Berlin, titled: “Genome assembly and annotation of the opportunistic amoeba Balamuthia mandrillaris using multiple-platform data”.
2010 - 2013
Bachelor in Bioinformatics at Freie Universität Berlin (Germany). B.Sc. thesis with Peter Robinson at Charitê Berlin (Germany), titled: “Assessment of the GBS method and disease-association analysis in a large mammalian genome”.
2008 - 2010
IT Consultant at Siemens IT solutions and Services Munich (Germany), mainly working on database optimization (MS SQL Server) and web development (ASP.NET, Java Server Faces, Perl [if you can believe it…]).
2006 - 2008
Software engineer at Siemens IT Solutions and services, developing and maintaining a monitoring and billing system (C#, ASP.NET) for software-as-a-service (SaaS) products.
2003 - 2006
Bachelor in Computer Science at Universät Paderborn (Germany). B.Sc. thesis with Odej Kao at Technische Universitàt Berlin, titled: “Sicherheitskonzept für ein Service-orientiertes System in einem Grossunternehmen”.
