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Science

After the abitur at the Goethe-Gymnasium Emmendingen in 1996 and one year of civil service at the Zentrum für Psychiatrie in Emmendingen I started studying biology (diploma) at the University of Freiburg in 1997. I took biochemistry as a major subject and genetics, bioinformatics and computer science as minor subjects.

In spring 2001 I did an internship at La Roche, Basel, in the cheminformatics department by Gisbert Schneider. Under the supervision of Jochen Zuegge I contributed to the development of a fast virtual screening filter for cytochrome P450 3A4 inhibition (published in QSAR). This internship ensured me to continue my studies in the field of cheminformatics. Therefore, I wrote my diploma thesis in the research group of Gisbert Schneider (modlab) at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Chemical Biology at the University of Frankfurt from September 2002 to April 2003. The topic of my diploma thesis was a comparison of support vector machines and artifical neural networks for pharmacophore-based compound selection. You can download a compressed pdf of my diploma thesis (approx. 2.7mb). Some of the results of my diploma thesis were published together with my colleague Evgeny Byvatov. I completed my degree in April 2002 with the diploma in biology.

Since June 2002 I am working on my PhD in the modlab research group. I started with the detailed evaluation of certain influences on the result of a virtual screening campaign. These studies included the comparison of different data sets, different correlation vector descriptors and different distance metrics and led to a publication in the Journal of Computer-Aided Molecular Design and another one in chembiochem. I continued my work with regard to virtual screening with the optimization of a pharmacophore-based correlation vector descriptor (QSAR & Combinatorial Science). Some results of the virtual screening studies were also presented as a poster at the 3rd Joint Sheffield Conference on Cheminformatics.

In spring 2004 I directed my research to the computational de novo design of drugs. This yielded a fast molecule generator written in the programming language C with extensive usage of the Daylight Toolkit. Results were presented as a poster at IBC's 9th Annual World Congress Drug Discovery Technology 2004, at the 18th CIC-Workshop 2004, and at the 7th International Conference on Chemical Structures. Since July 2004 I am a scholarship holder of an sanofi-aventis grant.

You can view a complete list of my publications.


last changed: June 2005   

September 2009

Recently, it was brought to my attention by a friend of mine that my website is pretty much outdated. He was even bold enough to tell me that the design of my site is very 90ish and that it demands a complete overhaul. Although my first impulsive reaction was to object against this - surely unjustified - harsh criticism I decided to spend a moment of my precious time to throw an unprejudiced glance at the site (translates to: visited my own website for the first time in what seems to be many years). And sure enough - my friend was completely right!

That's why I closed the site down for the time being. I am still considering what to do with it. Most likely it will be back soon, fully revamped with lots of very sophisticated state of the art web 2.0 features. I wasn't able to overcome the temptation of immediately taking a huge step forward and implemented the first twodotzero component right away: You can visit my facebook page using the icon at the bottom right! If I'm not procrastinating by twittering, facebooking or IMing I might while away my time checking my email account, so feel free to drop me a .

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