The Team 

My name is Evans Kataka. Starting from October 2019, I will join the Chair of Experimental Bioinformatics at TU Munich as a postdoctoral researcher. I will be working on both the SyMBoD and LipiTUM projects which have an emphasis on systems biomedicine. From 2015 until recently, I have been pursuing my PhD in Bioinformatics at the Chair of Genome Oriented Bioinformatics (TUM). Previously, I received my Master’s degree in Bioinformatics from The University of Nairobi (Kenya) after a brief visiting scholarship position at The Ohio State University (Columbus, Ohio) in Erich Grotewold’s Lab. Before that, I did my BSc in Biotechnology and Biochemistry at Kenyatta University (Kenya). During my Ph.D, I developed a novel method on how to use condition-specific protein-protein interaction networks in cancer to discover biomarkers at the multi-cancer, cancer-type and cancer sub-type levels. 

My name is Tim Rose. I'm a PhD student in the LipiTUM group. I received my Bachelor's degree in Quantitative Biology in Düsseldorf, where I did my thesis on equilibrium behavior of the Pentose Phosphate Pathway. After that, I worked on a master's project in modeling of radiation response of cancer cells to obtain a M.Sc. degree in Biophysics. My research interests are analysis and modeling of multi-omics data, development of software tools for simulations/analysis and HPC. I think the utilization of multi-omics data is the key to infer the complexity of cells and get an understanding of how the different levels relate to each other and result in a specific phenotype. In my PhD project I work on data mining, analysis pipelines and the integration of lipidomics with other omics data.

I am Kundai Sachikonye, a PhD student in the LipiTUM group. My PhD project aims at developing methods for the identification and quantification of lipid species in (LC-)MSn by contributing to develop the LipiTUM platform which will encompass the following features: instrument independent peak list extraction from raw data, feature finding algorithms for deisotoping and quantification, fragmentation rules and deep learning, statistical routines for feature scoring, identification confidence and quality control, and web service-based applications for visualization of results. I did my Bachelor's degree in Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Jacobs University Bremen and graduate studies in Pharmaceutical Biotechnology, Clinical Chemistry and Bioinformatics at HAW Hamburg,  UKE Hamburg and  Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. Up until my new position at TUM I worked as a scientific assistant at the Fraunhofer IGB in Stuttgart.

My name is Nikolai Köhler. I'm a master student in Molecular Biotechnology at TUM with a special interest in bioinformatics and biochemical analytics. Through an internship at the University of Melbourne/Metabolomics Australia I gained practical experience in MS-based lipidomics analysis and the current computational and analytical challenges. I recently joined the group as a HiWi to participate in and contribute to ongoing collaborations and I will do a research project, in which I will develop a scoring method for spectrum matches for the LipiTUM platform.

My name is Lisa Falk, a master student in Molecular Biotechnology with a background in Bioinformatics. I received my Bachelor’s degree at the University of Tübingen with a thesis on Qualitative Models. As a HiWi I contribute to existing projects. Currently, I work with lipid related databases, extract and map relevant data and make them easier accessible.