About
I teach the courses collected here. This page is a short introduction — who I am and where my expertise comes from — so you have a sense of who is behind the material. There is more on my personal page.
What I do
I am a researcher and team lead for Bioinformatics and Translational Research at the Genome Competence Centre of the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, Germany’s national public-health institute. My team studies infectious diseases in a One Health context — bringing together real-time nanopore sequencing, pangenomics, the analysis of environmental samples such as wastewater, and the study of microbial evolution into bioinformatics for genomic surveillance.
How I got here
I studied Bioinformatics at the University of Jena (FSU) and stayed for a PhD, specialising in RNA bioinformatics and high-throughput sequencing analysis. I then joined the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in Hinxton, UK, working in microbiome informatics, before moving to the Robert Koch Institute in 2020, where I now lead my team.
The through-line is the one this teaching is built around: turning the text that sequencing machines produce into biological and clinical answers.
