Saez-Rodriguez Group

Systems Biomedicine

Daniel Dimitrov

In 2014, I moved to the UK for my Bachelor’s degree in Cell Biology at the University of Stirling. My undergraduate thesis project focused on the interpretation of 16S/metaproteomics data and it assessed the combined impact of anthropogenic pollutants and sunlight on microbial communities. This project confirmed my captivation with the fields of omics analyses and the microbiome, and it also underlined my interest in the development of functional genomics tools.
As a consequence of my increasingly computational aspirations, I enrolled in a Master’s degree in Bioinformatics at the University of Glasgow from which I graduated in December 2019. For my Master’s thesis project, I developed a user-friendly application for the comprehensive analysis of bulk and single-cell RNA-Seq data. Following my graduation I worked shortly as a Data Engineer in the private sector.
In September 2020, I started pursuing my PhD in the group of Julio Saez-Rodriguez as an Early Stage Researcher involved in the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action ETN STRATEGY-CKD consortium.

Research Interests

I find the integration of diverse omics data sets to be exceptionally exciting and even more so when coupled to the human microbiome.
Embedding the microbiome with other omics data types has the potential to provide holistic insights that could more accurately reflect the pathophysiology of complex diseases. As such, I am interested in the application and development of systems biology approaches that could reveal disease-relevant microbiota and molecular mechanisms.
My goal is to apply and develop such approaches to build high-dimensional disease models that have the potential to yield clinically relevant therapeutic targets in the context of Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) and CKD-related Cardiovascular Disease.

Professional Career

2020–Present: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Early Stage Researcher (Strategy-CKD)
2018-2018: IMPRS Summer Internship at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden, Germany
2017-2017: Summer Internship at the Observatoire océanologique de Banyuls-sur-Mer, France

Education

2020-Present: PhD Candidate, Institute for Computational Biomedicine, Heidelberg University, Faculty of Medicine & Heidelberg University Hospital, Germany
2018–2019: MSc in Bioinformatics, University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK
2014–2018: BSc (Hons) in Cell Biology, University of Stirling, Scotland, UK