Saez-Rodriguez Group

Systems Biomedicine

Hanna Schumacher

I studied computer science at the University of Applied Sciences Mannheim. The lectures and projects ranged from mathematics and theoretical informatics over software architecture and programming to requirements engineering, design thinking and project management which concluded into a master’s degree in software engineering.

In my bachelor thesis I found the mathematical proof for the numbers of existing strong comma-free genetic codes per cardinality. Staying in the biological field I wrote my master thesis about the influence of the aminoacyl tRNA synthetase feedback loop on genetic code evolution. Therefore I coded in Scala and analyzed statistically in R a simulation of the translation process.

Afterwards, in my position as computational biologist in the Microbiome & Cancer division at the DKFZ, I set up a microbiome analysis workflow and analyzed a high variety of projects.

Following up on this experience I am now focusing on improving workflows in single cell data analysis in Saez-Rodriguez group.

Research Interests

I’m strongly interested in improving sequencing data analysis with flexible, but in their core standardized, analysis workflows. I believe that a solid foundation can serve the analysis immensely. This foundation can for example consist of clear decision metrics in the preprocessing, low redundancy in repetitive steps, a unified folder structure, naming conventions and documentation as well as clear and easy connections between different workflows.

I’m currently working on single cell data and aim to integrate the high variety of pipelines into an overall workflow that standardizes the overlaps of these single pipelines and embeds them into an infrastructure (HPC clusters, storage, cloud, …) that serves the demanding needs of the data.

Professional Career

2021-present Bioinformatician at Saez-Rodriguez’s group, Institute for Computational Biomedicine, Heidelberg University, Faculty of Medicine & Heidelberg University Hospital, Germany
2019-2021 Computational Biologist, Microbiome and Cancer division, DKFZ German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany
2017/18 Nine months project with SAP, University of Applied Sciences Mannheim and Stanford University as part of ME310
2015/16 Six months internship at CEMA GmbH Mannheim, Germany

Education

2017-2019 M.Sc. Informatics Software Engineering, University of Applied Sciences, Mannheim, Germany
2013-2017 B.Sc. Informatics, University of Applied Sciences, Mannheim, Germany