About

Hi there. I am 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 involved applying machine learning methods to microbiome data. For example, I helped to develop the SIAMCAT R package, a versatile toolbox for machine learning-based comparative metagenomic analyses. Another project of mine focused on 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.

Outside of the lab I enjoy everything outdoors, such as hiking, biking, or bouldering. I recently also discovered baking as a hobby and am reading mostly sci-fi and fantasy literature (especially from Alastair Reynolds).