About
I was born in Canada, in a small town north of Toronto Newmarket and lived in Aurora [where I went to the Well street public school]. I completed high school after moving to Germany in the early 90ties. I enrolled in biological sciences at the Westphalian Wilhems-University in 2001 and started taking courses in computer science soon after. In 2004 I spent two summer terms as a visiting student at the faculty science , University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, where I took courses in software development, molecular genetics and statistics. I completed my diplom (equiv. MSc) in the group of Evolutionary Bioinformatics with majors in molecular biology and bioinformatics and a minor in computer science. I am currently a PhD candidate at the same group which is now part of the newly formed institute for Evolution and Biodiversity.
Research
My research interests lies in the modularity of protein evolution, and, to some more general degree, in genome evolution. I am currently exploring the impact of retrotransposition on the domain-wise evolution of proteins. Beyond domains, I am helping to develop a tool geared towards simplifying large scale gene-ontology based analysis.
Evomatics
That’s originally *evo*lution and infor*matics* and goes back to a web project I started with a
friend of mine. Somewhere along the line the project died away and was offline for a while; I kept the domain (technically not quite true… I just stuck to the ‘evomatics’ part). Today I use it as a personal website. Evomatics is basically a playground… in the current setup I am running
debian with
apache as a fwd proxy and
ruby on rails running on
lighttpd. And it’s nice. Just as a side remark, evomatics was designed purely using
publicly available, open-source software. The site should comply with well-defined web standards: it is
valid xhtml stict and
css and should be viewable with any (most) modern browsers (or even text-based browsers such as
lynx or
w3m). If you should spot errors or compliance issues, please
let me know.
Music
John Miles sucks…. but I like music, and after playing myself for a while, I am now a full time listener and will listen to
any music I am sent.
