About Me

I am a 29 years old and live in Germany, near Munich.

In 2005 I completed my education as Dipl. Ing. for Bioinformatics, a degree that is approximately equal to bachelor with honors in international education systems. For two years I worked at Roche Pharma in Penzberg, where I did scientific support in Bioinformatics and computational biology as well as application development. Since January 2007 I am employed at Mathworks GmbH in Ismaning as Application Engineer for Biotechnology/Pharma industries.
My motivation to study bioinformatics came relatively late. I was born in eastern Germany as son of a self employed Baker. After secondary school I did an apprenticeship for the profession of a baker as well. During this time I already recognised that this was not the right profession for me. I started to plan for a different career after my apprenticeship but still worked as baker for a little bit more than a year.
After my 10 month military service I went to a technical college in Dippoldiswalde and gained the title technician for food production, together with the technical diploma (higher levels). The certifications were very well and I decided for an education in Bioinformatics at the university of applied science Weihenstephan in Freising. This was what crystallized out as my subject of interrest over the years.

My main focus during studies was software engineering and I developed programming skills with several languages (C/C++ and Java being the major players) plus a working knowledge in the software development cycle: testing, quality assurance, documentation, project work and -management, user training. On the other hand site I got a very good background in molecular biology, analytics and other fields of biotechnology. Especially in the healt industry and biotechnology, this enables me to understand the user, his/her opinions, requests and wishes during software projects. I recognised this as very important for a project’s success.
In two practical trainings, each being 6 months long and one at Agresearch Limited in New Zealand, I gained practical experience. This experience was continued and developed in the position at Roche Pharma, where I, together with a team of coworkers, am responsible for the enhancement and maintenance of several internal software solutions.

Some time ago I discovered Tcl/Tk, one of the greatest programming languages ever. So far I used it to develop programs at work and some small tools at home. Also, I contributed to several Tcl/Tk related open source projects and extensions. This developed my programming skills, especially in bug hunting and communication with the project teams – and it’s fun for me. I am also fluent in the programming languages C/C++, Java and Python.