Biography
I am a bioinformatician in the Hildebrand Group based at the Quadram Institute, with a strong interest in metagenomics, k-mer based analysis of metagenomes, C++ tool development and further the analysis of sequencing errors all aimed towards improving metagenomic analysis and pushing the taxonomic resolution beyond species/subspecies level.
I have both a bachelor's and master's degree in bioinformatics from the University of Tuebingen. After I focused on immunomics in my bachelors, I developed an interest for metagenomics during my masters. As a result, my master thesis is about k-mer based taxonomic profiling using protein reference. In order to follow this passion for metagenomics, I joined Falk Hildebrand's group as a PhD student.
In my PhD I focus on k-mer based methods for taxonomic and strain-level profiling as well as modelling sequencing errors to improve the taxonomic resolution and accuracy which is greatly impaired by these errors. To achieve this, I use C++ for high performance tool development, data structures such as specialized hash maps for efficient data storage as well as Python and R for scripting and statistical analysis, respectively.
