Uwe Ohler

Since 2012, Uwe Ohler has been Professor at the Max Delbrueck Center in Berlin, with a primary appointment in the Department of Biology and a secondary appointment in the Department of Computer Science at Humboldt University Berlin. He is a fellow of the Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data at TU Berlin. At the MDC, Uwe coordinates the Data Science & Artificial Intelligence cross-cutting topic area.

Uwe studied computer science with a minor in biology at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany, graduating in 1996. From 1998-2001, he was a graduate student at the Chair for Pattern Recognition (Professor Heinrich Niemann) at the same university, as a Boehringer Ingelheim pre-doctoral fellow and a visiting researcher with the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project (Professor Gerald Rubin). He obtained his PhD with distinction in 2002 for the McPromoter system for computational identification of promoters in eukaryotic genomes.

Before returning to Germany, Uwe lived in the US for more than a decade and followed his interests in gene regulation and applied machine learning. From 2002-2004, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Biology (Professor Chris Burge) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2005, he joined the faculty of the Institute of Genome Sciences & Policy at Duke University, Durham NC, USA, where he received tenure in 2011. He has been a fellow of the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, as well as recipient of HFSP, NSF CAREER, and NIH Transformative Research awards. Current projects are, among others, funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the BMBF.