About

Hello there. My name is Jakob and I am currently a Postdoctoral fellow in the group of Ami Bhatt at the Stanford University School of Medicine. In my work, I use computational tools to investigate how the microbiome contributes to human health and disease, especially in the context of cancer.

I obtained my PhD after working in the group of Georg Zeller at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg. My research there focussed on statistical methods and machine learning tools for microbiome data. During my PhD, I helped to develop the SIAMCAT R package, a versatile toolbox for machine learning-based comparative metagenomic analyses. Another project of mine investigated the connection between the gut microbiome and colorectal cancer, where we performed a meta-analysis to evaluate how consistent microbiome-disease associations are across different datasets. The last project of my PhD was a benchmark for association testing methods in microbiome data. We developed a framework to generate realistic data sets for benchmarking and evaluated various association testing methods, including simulated settings of confounding.