Principal Investigator






Christian L. Müller, Ph.D.
Principal Investigator, Helmholtz Munich, LMU München, Flatiron Institute, New York
christian.mueller@helmholtz-muenchen.de
+498931873043
@microbionaut
muellsen
Christian L. Müller has been a group leader at the Institute of Computational Biology (ICB), Helmholtz Munich since 2019 and Professor for Biomedical Statistics and Data Science at the Department of Statistics at LMU München. Since 2014, he has been affiliated with the Simons Foundation, New York, where he is currently a project leader in computational statistics at the Center for Computational Mathematics (CCM), Flatiron Institute.
Christian studied computer science, bioinformatics, and poetry at Uppsala University, Sweden, and the Univeristy of Tübingen, Germany and received his Ph.D. in computer science from ETH Zürich, Switzerland. Christian held postdoctoral positions at ETH Zürich and NYU, and deeply cares about method development in high-dimensional statistics, (non-)convex optimization, shallow and deep learning, and their applications to high-throughput biological data sets. The secret life of microbes (the microbiome) holds a special place in Christian's heart (and gut).
Outside the lab, you can find Christian running in the parks and playing soccer.




Ph.D. Students





Oleg Vlasovets
Graduate Student, Helmholtz Munich
Personal Website
oleg.vlasovetc@helmholtz-muenchen.de
@ovlasovets
Vlasovets
Oleg received his MSc degree in Data Science from a joint program of Aalto University and Eindhoven University of Technology. His master thesis is focused on detecting anomalies of industrial vessel performance with Bayesian and unsupervised statistical methods. His research interests are oriented toward optimisation theory, statistical learning and network inference that can be applied in microbiology. In the BioDataScience Lab, Oleg works on causal inference of gut microbiome, food allergies and non-IgE intolerances. Also, his efforts involve making contributions to QIIME2 - an open-sorce bioinformatic platform, which adheres to the FAIR principles of open science.
Oleg has work experience in industry and his BSc degree in Business Informatics from HSE University with minor on Data Mining from Yandex.
He also enjoys solving machine learning problems from the business domain, e.g., participating in hackathons and Kaggle competitions. If you don’t find him doing one the activities above, you will probably find him on a tennis court.






Stefanie Peschel
Graduate Student, Department of Statistics at LMU
Personal Website
stefanie.peschel@stat.uni-muenchen.de
@stefpeschel
stefpeschel
Stefanie studied Statistics with an Economic and Social Science Background at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) of Munich. Her master's thesis was her first foray into the world of microbial network analysis, which formed the basis of her doctoral studies. She started her Ph.D. at the Institute of Asthma and Allergy Prevention at the Helmholtz Zentrum München and now continues her work in our group. As part of her doctoral thesis, she developed the R package "NetCoMi", which provides methods for constructing, analyzing, and comparing networks for microbiome data. Besides her scientific activities, Stefanie also leads the Early Career Working Group (AG Nachwuchs) of the IBS-DR.
Current teaching: "Introduction to statistical software (R)" (winter semester 2024/25)






Daniele Pugno
Graduate Student, Helmholtz Munich
Personal Website
daniele.pugno@helmholtz-muenchen.de
@DanielePugno
gnopuz83
Daniele has a Master’s degree in Statistical and Actuarial Science from "Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (UCSC) - Milan". In his Master’s thesis, he focused on time series models and the implementation of post-processing models for the correction of forecasting errors. After his Master's Degree, he worked for one year as a data scientist in a biotechnological start-up. His research interests include statistical learning, multivariate statistics and network inference. Currently, he is working on network inference of gut microbiome with a focus on phage-bacteria interaction. In his free time, Daniele enjoys climbing, hiking in the mountains and reading.






Viet Tran
Graduate Student, Helmholtz Munich
Personal Website
viet.tran@campus.lmu.de
viettr
Viet studied Biostatistics and Philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) of Munich. In his Master’s thesis, he focused on extending the trac framework to classification tasks and applying the extension in a causal inference framework. His current research interests include statistical learning and compositional data analysis with applications to human health and the ocean. Viet enjoys playing tennis and reading in his free time.






Tong Wu
Graduate Student, Helmholtz Zentrum München
Personal Website
tong.wu@helmholtz-muenchen.de
@Tongwu9559
wyc9559
Tong Wu holds a Master’s degree in food science and engineering from Jiangnan University in China. Since his Master's studies, he has been interested in the gut microbiome, especially the potential interactions between the gut microbiome and human health. Currently, he focuses on the gut-liver-brain axis in Alzheimer’s disease scenarios using a multi-omits approach.
Tong loves playing table tennis and cooking in his spare time.






Medina Feldl
Graduate Student, Helmholtz Munich
Personal Website
bajramovic.medina@campus.lmu.de
medinabaj
Medina holds a bachelor in business mathematics from Ludwigs-Maximilian University, where she is also currently pursuing her masters degree in statistics and data science, with a special focus on biostatistics and high-dimensional data analysis.
Together with Roberto, she analyzes bacterial reponses to stress, in particular differential growth curve and luminescent curve analysis.
When Medina is not crunching numbers, she loves to get her hands dirty with plants while sipping on a freshly brewed coffee.




Master Students



Alumni



Aditya Mishra - PostDoc


Roberto Olayo Alarcón - PhD Student
Johannes Ostner - PhD Student
Mara Stadler - PostDoc and PhD Student
Alice Sommer - PhD Student
Jinlong Ru - PhD Student
Luise Rauer - PhD Student


Louis Sanden - Masther thesis
Stefanie Schmid - Master thesis
Salome Carcy - Master thesis
Medina Bajramovic - Master thesis
Maria Pröbstl - Master thesis
Jin Lin - Master thesis
Steffen Fohr - Master thesis
Lukas Mischinger - Master thesis
Teresa Rupprecht - Master thesis


Mahima Arunkumar - Bachelor thesis
“Biomedical Statistics and Data Science”