In 2014 I graduated from my master’s degree in Molecular Biology with a focus on cancer research at the Heidelberg University in conjunction with the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ). During the course of these studies I discovered my affinity for computational biology and data analysis, which culminated in a thesis project in which I developed and employed an image analysis pipeline for high-throughput RNAi screenings of synthetic lethality.
Later that year I joined Dr. Kiran Patil’s group at EMBL Heidelberg for my PhD where I studied metabolic network adaptation in minimal residual disease in breast cancer using multi-omics data analysis and integration with metabolic modeling, statistical analysis and regulatory network analysis. After my graduation in December 2018, I joined the MRC Toxicology Unit in Cambridge for a bridging Postdoc to develop a human metabolic model capable of identifying metabolic pathways of interference from metabolomics drug library screens. Additionally, I worked on a methodology to predict metabolic interactions from single-cell transcriptomics data.
I joined the group of Julio Saez-Rodriguez in January 2021 where I will work on novel approaches to integrate multi-omics data joining statistical and network based approaches deployed in the group. My particular focus lies on bridging the gap between epigenetic gene regulation and its manifestation on the transcriptome.
I am interested in the question of integrating large comprehensive biological data sets to discover new functional mechanisms and to drive our understanding of biology. To tackle this question I explore the idea of enriching methods of statistical correlation with the use of existing knowledge to build mechanistic data driven models precisely predicting the phenotypic outcome of a cell in health and disease.
Having a classical molecular biology background, I have always been interested in studying biology from different angles (leading to excursions to biophysics, structural biology, image analysis, single cell analysis). I envision a modeling approach eventually extending to the integration of various dimensions of a cell’s biology, e.g. bridging different layers (epigenetics –proteomics), functionalities (regulation – enzymatic activity) and molecules (RNA – metabolites) at different scales (atoms – organelles) and resolutions (single cells – tissues).
2019 – 2020 | Postdoctoral Fellow, Medical Research Council (MRC), Cambridge, UK |
2019 | Bridging Postdoctoral Fellow, European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) Heidelberg, Germany |
2014 – 2018 | PhD in Computational Biology, European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) Heidelberg and Heidelberg University, Germany |
2011 – 2014 | MSc in Molecular Biosciences with Major in Cancer Research, Heidelberg University and German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Germany |
2008 – 2011 | BSc in Biology, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany |
2006 – 2011 | BA in Social Psychology and Educational Sciences, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany |