People

Prof. Dr. Manfred Claassen

Principal investigator

Prof. Dr. Manfred Claassen has been appointed as Professor for Clinical Bioinformatics at the Medical Faculty of the University of Tübingen since January 2020. Before joining the University of Tübingen he was an Assistant Professor for Computational Biology at the ETH Zürich.

He has carried out parallel studies in Biochemistry and Computer Science at the University of Tübingen and been awarded a Diploma in Biochemistry in 2004 and a Diploma in Computer Science in 2006. In 2010 he obtained a PhD from ETH Zurich. During his doctoral studies he developed statistical methods to design and validate proteome measurements. In 2011 he moved on for postdoctoral training with Daphne Koller at Stanford University, where he focused on inferring informative network models from single cell resolved perturbation studies.

Manfred Claassen’s research focuses on learning explainable quantitative models in systems medicine from high dimensional single-cell omics data. Health and disease status of multicellular organisms pivotally depends on rare cell populations, such as hematopoietic stem cells or tumor initiating cell subsets. The Claassen lab develops representation learning approaches to identify disease associated cell subsets, ultimately enabling comparative single-cell studies, e.g. for immunotherapy response prediction in melanoma or diagnosis of multiple sclerosis and detection spatial tissue determinants of disease association. Particular focus lies on dynamic processes which are increasingly studied by high-dimensional single-cell snapshots. Such measurements enable evaluation of cell population distributions and their evolution over time.