4th Berlin Summer School - Meet Our Invited Speakers


Posted on March 17, 2020


Meet our invited speaker Prof. Dr. Manja Marz

Dr. Marz is leader of the group 'non-coding RNAS in aging: the regulation of aging' at the Leibniz Institute on Aging and full professor for 'High Throughput Sequencing Analysis' at Friedrich Schiller University Jena.

Brief Resume

Dr. Marz studied biology and computer sciences in Leipzig, Edinburgh and Darmstadt. She finished in 2005 her first diploma in biology and in 2006 her second diploma in computer science. Between 2006 and 2009 she worked on her PhD thesis in bioinformatics and got her doctorate degree in 2009 from the University of Leipzig.

In 2010 she moved to Marburg and started a Junior-Professorship in "High Throughput Sequencing Analysis" and became leader of a 'RNA Bioinformatics' group at Philipps-University Marburg. In 2015 she got a full profssorship for "High Throughput Sequencing Analysis" at Friedrich Schiller University Jena and a research group at the Leibniz Institute for Age Research – Fritz Lipmann Institute. She is also scientific advisory board member of RNA Central and Rfam, Founding member, board member and managing director of “European Virus Bioinforamtics Center” and Founding and board member of ZAJ (Aging Research Center Jena).


Meet our invited speaker Dr. Kristin Reiche

Dr. Reiche is leader of the Bioinformatics Unit at the Fraunhofer Institute for Cell Therapy and Immunology (IZI) in Leipzig.

Brief Resume

Dr. Reiche studied computer science and medical informatics in Leipzig and Liverpool. In 2003 she finished her diploma and started her PhD studies at the bioinformatics chair of Leipzig University. She got her doctoral degree in 2007 with highest honors (summa cum laude).

In 2011 she started a postdoc position at the RNomics group at the Fraunhofer Institute for Cell Therapy and Immunology (IZI) and in 2012 she moved to the Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in a research group for bioinformatics and transcriptomics. In 2012 she spent three month at the Broad Institute of the MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, USA. Since 2015 she is head of the bioinformatics unit at the Fraunhofer Institute for Cell Therapy and Immunology (IZI) and since 2019 she is a senior research scientist at the Institute of Clinical Immunology of the Medical Faculty at Leipzig University.


Meet our invited speaker Niroshan Nadarajah

Mr. Nadarajah is head of Bioinformatics Innovation & Partner Management at the Munich Leukemia Laboratory (MLL).

Brief Resume

Niroshan Nadarajah studied computer science with a special focus on bioinformatics at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and received his M.Sc. in 2011. After researching at a bioinformatics group at UC Davis in California (US) and working as a senior web developer for a German media agency, he started working for the Munich Leukemia Laboratory (MLL) in 2011. Here, he started the development of a software pipeline for NGS diagnostics. He developed a web application to manage quality control and interpretation of NGS/laboratory processes. After some years as a team leader of 6 bioinformaticians, he is now head of Bioinformatics Innovation. He introduces advanced methods and technologies into routine diagnostics workflows, including Cloud computing for NGS and AI methods for phenotype analysis for cytomophology and immunophentyping. In 2017 and 2018 he was member of the MLL management board.


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