Michael Kuhn

This is the homepage of Michael Kuhn (né Müller). I am from Leipzig and/or Dresden and lived in Pasadena, CA, for three years while studying at Caltech. I did my PhD in the lab of Peer Bork at the EMBL Heidelberg, working on integrating protein-chemical interactions with phenotypic data to predict drug targets and to find the molecular basis of side effects.

Between 2009 and 2016, I worked as a post doc in the labs of Andreas Beyer (first Biotec, TU Dresden, now University of Cologne), Tony Hyman and Marino Zerial (MPI-CBG). My main topics of research were: the evolutionary analysis of the centrosome, the conservation of tissue-specific gene expression patterns between distant species, and the analysis of large-scale screening data. Since 2016, I have been a research staff scientist in the lab of Peer Bork, partially managing the lab and also performing research on the gut microbiota and the effects of medications on humans.

eMail: mkuhn@embl.de

Elsewhere: Twitter, bioCS, a blog, Tumblr, Biology StackExchange

Scientific Interests

I enjoy working at the intersection of wet-lab and computational biology. During my post-doc, this mainly concerned cell biology questions, while now I am more working with microbiological data.

Underlying tools that I built together with others are: STITCH, SIDER, and MATADOR.

Scientific Vita

An affair with chemistry in high school led me twice to the International Chemistry Olympiad. However, I learned from hands-on experience in organic chemistry labs that I did not want to pursue a wet-lab career. Therefore I decided to study computer science at Caltech, where it was also possible to put an emphasis on biochemistry. Caltech's Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) provided me with the opportunity to work in David Baker's lab in Seattle. During a year-long study term in Dresden, I worked on automatically analyzing single molecule force spectroscopy spectra with Daniel Müller. Later, I worked in Michael Schroeder's lab on protein-protein interfaces, again with SURF funding. I received my PhD (Dr. rer. nat.) from the University of Heidelberg with summa cum laude after research in the lab of Peer Bork at the EMBL in Heidelberg. The topic of my PhD thesis was: "Integrating chemical and protein interactions: From interaction networks to human phenotypes."

Publications