Scientific Career 

• 06/2026 - present: PhD student - Microbial Data Science Group, Department Computational Biology and Chemnistry, Helmholtz - Centre for environmental Research - UFZ Leipzig
• 10/2023 - 05/2026: Master of Science in Bioinformatics - Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg
• 10/2020 - 11/2026: Bachelor of Science in Bioinformatics - Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg

Research Interests

Ever since high school, I have been very interested in the natural sciences. Studying bioinformatics has allowed me to combine two very different fields of study: biology and computer science. My studies have sparked a particular interest in biological sequences, though I am also interested in algorithms, data science, and machine learning.

I am currently pursuing my PhD as part of the IDEAS project, where domain science meets data science. For my doctoral thesis, I am working with protein language models, which aim to understand the language of proteins. They are intended to help researchers gain insight into new sequences when homology-based approaches reach their limits.

Publications

• Grau, J., Weise, D., Panster, M., Schattat, M. H., & Keilwagen, J. (2026). Improved reconstruction of transcripts and coding sequences from RNA-seq data. Nucleic Acids Research, 54(4), gkag091.