I am a PhD student with background in bioinformatics, scientific computing, and data science working on computational structural biology.

My PhD project is part of the Collaborative Research Center 1456: “Mathematics of Experiment” and associated with the initiative Interactive Inference by the Faculty of Maths and Computer Science at Uni Jena.

The goal is to find methods of inference that allow us to use cryo-EM images of protein samples to understand not only the static spatial structure of this protein but also its conformational movements. It’s just like with a human hand: Its 3D-structure (with five separated fingers, for example) is surely very important for its usability. But understanding what a hand is actually capable of requires to consider how it can change its form.

The main obstacle for this kind of inference is that we lose all information about when a molecule takes a certain shape, all we can hope to (directly) reconstruct is the shape itself. One central idea for this project is that Bayesian approaches can mitigate the lack of information in the data. This, in turn, requires finding good probabilistic models of protein structure and conformational change.

Further links

You can also find me on GitHub, on LinkedIn, on Mastodon, or on my personal website.