I have a strong track record of high impact publications. These include a widely recognised manuscript pioneering spatially resolved transcriptomic tissue reconstruction at single-cell resolution (Science, 2017). My PhD work was recognized as outstanding by my PhD Institute, the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (PhD award 2017). My research proposal for my postdoc was elected for funding by EMBO (EMBO LTF fellowship) and the project was published in Nature Biotechnology.
Vision
Two central goals in biology are understanding of the linkage between genes and phenotypes at multiple organizational levels and the development of increasingly complex predictive digital models of biological systems. To overcome the challenges of scale and complexity inherent to these goals a multitude of integrated scale crossing and scalable methods are necessary.
I believe that sequencing and imaging technologies will progressively merge and increase in scale, throughput and multi-modality. This will allow seamless extraction or imputation of multiple modalities of global quantitative cellular measurements with multiscale spatio-temporal resolution.
Combined with organoid technology, pooled CRISPR perturbations, drug screens and other high throughput perturbations these technologies will enable the mapping of the gene-phenotype landscape from cells to organs. Multiscale multimodal phenotyping will facilitate mechanistic insight into the bidirectional governance between genome activity, cell and tissue morphogenesis in health and disease.
In the future rich cell and tissue phenotypic reference atlases will be used to augment personalized medicine. Furthermore cellular models approaching molecule completeness will allow to run in-silico experiments and make multimodal scale-crossing 4D predictions with near-molecule accuracy. I view my research in this broad research trajectory.