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Team Members
From 2008.igem.org
Prof. Dr. Roland Eils
Thanks to Professor Eils, since he will sponsor travel/participation stipends for all undergraduate students on the team to attend the final jamboree at MIT. He will also provide R&D facilities and a team budget. Professor Eils is head of the Departments of Theoretical Bioinformatics in the institutes Bioquant, IPMB, and DKFZ. Moreover, he is founding director of Bioquant and directs the German-wide Systems Biology in Cancer initiative of the Helmholtz foundation with a volume of 50 Mio. Euro. Together with Professor Wolfrum he directs the Viroquant initiative on modeling and simulation of virus entry. He has won numerous awards in the field of image analysis; in particular he has been twice awarded the Biofuture price by the BMBF for innovations allowing the graphical reconstruction of the eukaryotic mitosis process from 4D microscopy images. In 2004, he was one of the organizers of the International Conference on Systems Biology, which was hosted by him here in Heidelberg. His publication with Martin Bentele, Inna Lavrik and Professor Krammer on the computational determination of the CD95 threshold in The Journal of Cell Biology in 2004 gave birth to the current Applied Systems Biology group, which is now largely involved in the research of cancer signaling. In 2004, Professor Eils, Ivayla Vacheva, and Professor Bock have won the Microsoft Research Award for the development of Optimal Experiment Design tools. His new engagement in the up-coming field of synthetic biology underlines the need for tight interdisciplinary work between experimentalists and theoreticians. back
Dr. Victor Sourjik
Victor Sourjik has studied Molecular Biology and Physics at University of Regensburg. He has done his PhD at the Institute of Physics and Technology in Moskow and in the lab of Professor R. Schmitt at University of Regensberg. He then went as post-doctoral scientist for five years to Professor H. Berg at Harvard University in Cambridge, USA, and became group leader in 2003 at the Center for Molecular Biology in Heidelberg. Victor investigates bacterial chemotaxis as example for the molecular perception of environmental signals and their transduction within cells. He combines quantitative data with computational modeling to obtain a detailed understanding of the signaling mechanisms in complex systems. In his Nature publication in 2005 he could use criteria for systems robustness in order to predict a correct topology for the Che signal transduction network. This approach has become a paradigm for the utilization of systems biology to pursue biological research. For his successful research on prokaryotic signal transduction Victor has won the Chica and Heinz Schaller award in 2007. We are sure that his broad experience in the field of bacterial chemotaxis will be a key asset to the strength of our team.
Dr. Hauke Busch
Hauke is group leader within the Applied Systems Biology group of Professor Eils at Bioquant. Due to his firm background in systems theory he is an enthusiastic fan of synthetic biology and iGEM; it is for his persevering encouragements that an iGEM team for Heidelberg could be initiated. Hauke has done his Ph. D. in non-linear dynamics at the Technical University of Darmstadt. At the DKFZ in Heidelberg he has been involved in the start-up of today's Applied Systems Biology group. He currently works on several interdisciplinary projects at Bioquant and DKFZ. His findings on the orchestration of multiple signaling pathways controlling keratinocyte migration have recently been accepted by Molecular Systems Biology. Inspired by his background in stochastic modeling he furthermore investigates transient gene expression states that are affected by random reaction kinetics due to low particle numbers, in particular in prokaryotes. He is also involved in the development of optimal experiment design tools for the parameter estimation in large ODE systems. With Jens and Victor he will coordinate and support the team during the summer. His experience with experimental biologists will help the team to find exciting connections between wet-lab biology and systems biology.
Links: http://www.dkfz.de/tbi/people/homepages/busch/
