Data Science and Services
The group led by Prof. Dr. Konrad Förstner develops data science methods, infrastructures and information services for the life sciences. Its focus areas are the analysis of high-throughput sequencing data, text mining in biomedical literature, knowledge graphs, and the responsible use of locally operated language models in research.
A large part of the work takes place within the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI): the group is involved in NFDI4Microbiota and helps build the basic services RDMTraining4NFDI and KGI4NFDI within Base4NFDI. Through workshops and training courses on data science, data literacy and research data management, it supports researchers, libraries and data stewards in working with data in an open, transparent and reproducible way.
Team
Head
- Prof. Dr. Konrad Förstner (Head of the Data Science and Services programme area, ZB MED / TH Köln)
Members
- Muhammad Elhossary (PhD student, ZB MED Cologne)
- Lina Junctorius (Training Coordinator RDMTraining4NFDI, ZB MED Cologne)
- Dr. Klaus Lippert (Team Lead LIVIVO, ZB MED Cologne)
- Rabea Müller (Head of Training, ZB MED Cologne)
- Ziyad Sanaullah (Research Associate LIVIVO, ZB MED Cologne)
- Dr. Till Sauerwein (Postdoc, ZB MED Cologne)
- Vanessa Scharf (PhD student, ZB MED Cologne)
- Cody Strange (Research Associate LIVIVO, ZB MED Cologne)
- Justine Vandendorpe (Data Steward, Training and NFDI4Microbiota, ZB MED Cologne)
- Mareike Wohltmann (Project Manager RDMTraining4NFDI, ZB MED Cologne)
- Benjamin Wolff (PhD student, ZB MED Cologne)
Former members Dr. Arindam Halder, Mandela Akinyemi Fasemore, Vivian Monzon, Felix Langer, Elnaz Jajin, Sughra Hakim, Martin Bilko, Silvia Di Giorgio, Dr. Eva Seidlmayer
Projects (selection)
- AQUAS (DFG)
- BioNT (EU)
- DiASPora (Leibniz Association): text mining of bacterial growth conditions
- git.nrw (DH NRW): shared Git infrastructure and training for universities in North Rhine-Westphalia
- GRADitude: Python tool for the analysis of Grad-seq data
- KGI4NFDI (Base4NFDI): basic service for building and operating knowledge graphs
- LIVIVO: search portal for the life sciences, including frontend development and classification with local language models
- MAK Collection (DFG): open access publication of the MAK and BAT values for occupational health and safety on PUBLISSO, together with the Open Science programme area
- NFDI4Microbiota (NFDI): research data infrastructure for microbiology
- PIXLS (DFG)
- RDMTraining4NFDI (Base4NFDI): NFDI-wide basic service for research data management training
- sRNARegNet (DFG)
- ZB MED Knowledge Environment: ZB MED's digital, interconnected knowledge base, which among other things underpins the LIVIVO search index
