Hi, my name is Christian and I am german-born scientist currently living in Seattle. I work on the interface of Microbial Systems Biology, Microbial Ecology, and Computational Biology, which means I am interested how all of the microbes, cells and molecules around and within us interact in order to form the stable ecological systems that populate virtually every surface of our planet including ourselves. In particular, I am interested how microorganisms interact with each other and their environment and what happens if those interactions are perturbed, for instance by disease or environmental changes. I strongly believe that we can leverage medical, biological, ecological, and environmental data to help us improve human health and to conserve our planet. However this will require an equitable, just, and diverse research community and society.

I love to learn new things and tinker and especially enjoy spending time with my partner and our dog. I also like to experiment and play around with different electronics. I enjoy sharing what I have learned and have taught many courses in academia and tech. If I am not doing any of that you will usually find me eating, cooking or baking.

If you want to know what I am currently up to follow me on twitter, mastodon, bluesky or see my projects on github.

I am currently a Research Scientist at the Institute for Systems Biology and working in the field of Microbial Systems Ecology and Evolution. This is done within the Gibbons Lab.

My work is focussed on the human gut microbiome which means I basically study the genetic material, metabolism and ecology of microbial communities that live within us. I am participating in or leading various projects that study the microbiota across thousands of individuals to identify the major changes in the microbiome during the transition from a healthy state to a diseased one. To that effect, I use various methods ranging from statistical inference to mathematical modeling in order to understand how the microbiome affects the host metabolism. I am particularly interested in methods that go beyond mere correlations and also do some wet lab work in order to validate computational predictions.

Before that I studied signaling in microbial cultures and metabolic alterations in cancer (you can find more about that in my publications.