Tobias Jakobi

Tobias is currently working as postdoctoral researcher at the University Hospital Heidelberg in the Section of Bioinformatics and Systems Cardiology (Dieterich lab) led by Christoph Dieterich. Tobias’ primary research topic is circular RNAs (circRNAs) in the context of cardiovascular disease. As a bioinformatician, he is working on solutions for the detection and analysis of circRNAs from sequencing data in order to obtain a deeper understanding of their function.

Tobias embraces the concept of open source software and prefers Debian as operating system, although his roots are in Slackware and Gentoo. He designed and maintains the computer cluster of the Dieterich lab. Over the last 20 years, he gained extensive knowledge of hardware maintenance, Linux server orchestration, network topology, job scheduling systems, and backup strategies.

In 2014, as scholar of the CLIB-Graduate Cluster Industrial Biotechnology, Tobias received his Ph.D. in bioinformatics on the topic of “Bioinformatic methods for eukaryotic RNA-Seq-based promoter identification” from Bielefeld University, supervised by Alexander Goesmann and Alfred Pühler. During his work as Ph.D. student he was involved in pioneer works regarding the transcriptome and microRNA landscape of the Chinese hamster ovary cell line, an important cell line for the production of recombinant therapeutic proteins.

As part of an internship at Illumina (Cambridge branch), he contributed to the development of compression algorithms for genomic databases based on the Burrows-Wheeler-Transformation and the comparison of compressed DNA databases.

During his master’s degree, which he received in 2010 from Bielefeld University, Tobias developed the regularly-cited graphics card-based (i.e. CUDA) read aligning software SARUMAN. The work was supervised by Alexander Goesmann and Jochen Blom.

In his free time Tobias enjoys photography with his Pentax K-3 II.