Hi, I'm Patrick, a research fellow at RWTH Aachen University.

To better understand how and when stem cells become functionally specialised cells, I use experiment and theory to model the dynamics of stem cell differentiation.

One experimental system I use are pluripotent stem cells. These cells can multiply indefinitely and produce all the cell types of the adult body when stimulated in specific ways. An example of this differentiation ability can be seen in the image above, which shows neuronal stem cells derived from pluripotent stem cells.

In collaboration with colleagues at Southampton University in the UK, I use these stem cells to establish a theory of stem cell differentiation. Read more about this work here.

In biomedical research, there is often a need to study complex biological phenomena in a simplified and tractable model system such as cell lines. In order to characterise these models, or to compare them to the original biological context, new methods are required that enable the transfer of information across systems.

In my research, I use machine learning to achieve this information transfer. For example, together with colleagues from Fukuoka, Japan and Edinburgh, UK, I used this approach to label cell types in one experiment, using information from another experiment. Such a label transfer is in itself very useful. Additionally, the success of the label transfer can be used to infer a type of similarity between models. Read more about this work here, and here (in German).

In collaboration with colleagues from Canada, Sweden, Italy, and the UK, I study the disease mechanism of rare neurological diseases.

The aim here is to formalise our understanding of the disease mechanism, using mathematical modelling. We probe the validity of these assumptions by comparing the predicted behaviour of the model to data collected from experiments.

The amount of data from clinical diagnostics is rapidly growing. These data offer new insights into the causes of diseases and promise a personalised management of diseases. In collaboration with colleagues in Aachen and Düsseldorf, I develop new ways in which these data can be harnessed for these purposes.

A particularly interesting aspect of this, is the use of data from wearables. In combination with predictive models, these wearables promise to improve the management of symptoms by providing actionable advice to patients. Read more about this here.