Professional Profile & Research

Positions

2023 – today

Research Associate, University of Rostock.as part of my PhD at the Modeling and Simulation Chair, Institute for Visual and Analytic Computing.

2021

Part-time intern, PlanetAI GmbH, Rostock.Image classification with convolutional neural networks in TensorFlow; cloud deployment with Terraform and Kubernetes.

2019 – 2020

Research Assistant, University of Edinburgh.On "Modeling Edinburgh's Mobility During the Festival". Built and validated a stochastic model of the Edinburgh cycle hire scheme using spatio-temporal model-checking and the process algebra CARMA, supervised by Jane Hillston; this became my first paper.

Education

2023 – today

PhD Computer Science, University of Rostock.Fields: simulation, machine learning, systems biology. Advisor: Adelinde M. Uhrmacher. Targeting a defense date in Q2 2027.

2021 – 2023

M.Sc. Computer Science, University of Rostock.Thesis on simulation-based optimization and parallel simulation, advised by Philipp Andelfinger.

2017 – 2021

B.Sc. Computer Science, University of Rostock.Thesis on stochastic discrete-event simulation, advised by Tom Warnke.

Teaching & Supervision

2023 – today

Tutoring for introductory lectures and master-level seminarsimperative programming; algorithms and data structures; seminar on simulation and machine learning; special lecture on differentiable simulation.

2023 – today

Thesis supervision of bachelor's and master's theses.Supervised four Bachelor's theses and three Master's theses.

2018 – 2019

Tutor in the Junior Studies Program, which gives high-school students a first taste of university.Algorithms and Data Structures; Functional Programming; Complexity and Formal Languages.

Awards

2024

Best Paper Award at CMSB '24.22nd International Conference on Computational Methods in Systems Biology.

2024

Best Master's Thesis 2022/23.Awarded by Informatik-Forum Rostock e.V.

2021

Best Bachelor's Thesis 2020/21.Awarded by Informatik-Forum Rostock e.V.

2020 – 2021

Deutschlandstipendium scholarship.Awarded by the University of Rostock.

2017

DPG Abiturpreis for outstanding performance in physics.Awarded by the German Physical Society.

Participation in the Academic System

2025 – 2026

PhD Colloquium Co-Chair, ACM SIGSIM PADS.

2024 – 2026

Reviewer, ACM SIGSIM PADS.review of papers, PhD colloquium contributions, and for the ACM reproducibility initiative.

ongoing

Student member of ACM and ACM SIGSIM.

Modeling and simulation often runs forwards: you write down a mechanism, then compute how it behaves over time. I work on the inverse problem: going from data back to the mechanism. This is much harder, because both the structure of the model and its parameters are unknown and the inverse mapping is not unique. It is part the emerging field of “AI for Science”, where AI is meant in its original, broad sense and large language models are just one small subclass. My dissertation focuses on the concrete instance of automated modeling of chemical reaction networks given time-series data.

My current research interests are:

• Learning mechanistic models from data. What my PhD is about: automatically discovering not just the parameters of a model but its structure from time series’ and prior knowledge, so that the result is interpretable and reusable instead of merely predictive.
• Artificial intelligence for science. How we can purposefully automate parts of the scientific process and support scientists in the discovery of new knowledge.
• Differentiable programming. Getting useful gradients out of programs and especially simulation models that often contain discrete branching leading to discontinuities and zero-gradients. This can enable faster calibration of simulation models than with the standard metaheuristics and end-to-end training of combined simulation/neural network architectures.

My main interest is in developing new methods, and I’m always happy to go into the theory as well where the problem calls for it. I’m also interested in interdisciplinary applications of the methods I develop or, even better, being inspired by interdisciplinary problems. Currently, my focus is on systems biology, where chemical reaction networks are a de-facto standard modeling formalism.