Please visit my new webpage: https://mds.inf.ethz.ch

I am a tenure-track assistant professor at the Computer Science Department of ETH Zurich. Before joining ETH, I was an assistant professor at the University of Basel, and before that a  postdoctoral fellow at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York,  and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Konstanz.

The focus of my research is on developing and extending machine learning techniques for precision medicine, the life sciences and biomedical data analysis. This field is exciting and challenging because new methods for a better understanding of diseases such as cancer, alzheimer or diabetes are enormou important. The field of action comprises many areas such as prediction of response to treatment in personalized medicine, (sparse) biomarker detection, tumor classiffication or the understanding of interactions between genes or groups of genes. The challenge lies not only in producing robust and reliable systems but also in systems that are easy to interpret. In the last years, I have extensively been working on machine learning methods and its applications in medical informatics, clinical data analysis and computational biology. Typically, we are given a set of observations and train a learning machine to be able to make accurate predictions about future observations or unobserved parts of reality. I am convinced that machine learning methods will continue to play a crucial role in the analysis of problems with the aim of personalized medicine and biomedical data analysis. Therefore, I have committed myself to contributing to the solution of problems that arise especially in the biomedical domain with the help of computer aided methods. Within the development of machine learning methods, so far I put special emphasis on Bayesian clustering models, multi-task learning, sparse feature selection problems like the Lasso and the Group-Lasso, time series analysis and clustering of large-scale biomedical data.

In 2012, I received my PhD from the University of Basel for my work in the Biomedical Data Analysis Group, headed by Volker Roth. During this time I was also  part of the LiverX project, a systemsX project that is a central component of ongoing programs in medical systems biology at the Competence Center for Systems Physiology and Metabolic Diseases.

Before joining the University of Basel in Nov 2008, I did a diploma degree in mathematics at the University of Konstanz (Germany).