Intro

Hi,

my name is Konrad Förstner - I hold a joint professorship for Data and Information Literacy at ZB MED - Information Center for Life Sciences and TH Köln. The research of my group covers a broad spectrum of applications of data science, bioinformatics and systems biology methods in the life sciences. This includes the integration and interpretation of large data sets - mainly generated using high-throughput sequencing technologies but also biomedical text corpora - with the aim to translate them into novel biological and medical insights. Additionally, we run projects that use and extend the knowledge commons by making research outcomes more open and FAIR. Since more than a decade I am advocating open science with all its facetes (data, publications, source code of research software, educational resources, publication metrics etc.) and am active in several communites promoting and implementing this. Furthermore, I try to empower others - researcher and people in information centric roles - by teaching digitial literacy and skills to work more efficiently and effectively with data, information and knowledge.

Short CV

• Since 2018: Professor for Data and Information Literacy (initally "Information Literacy") at the TH Köln – University of Applied Sciences and Head of Data Science and Services (initially "Information Services") at ZB MED - Information Centre for Life Sciences (see research group page).
• 2016 - 2018: Acting Head of the Core Unit Systems Medicine, University/Clinic of Würzburg
• 2013 - 2018: Head of Bioinformatics, Core Unit Systems Medicine, University/Clinic of Würzburg
• 2011 - 2013: Postdoc in the groups of Jörg Vogel and Cynthia Sharma, Institute of Molecular Infection Biology and Research Center for Infectious Diseases, University of Würzburg
• 2009 - 2011: Entrepreneurial and freelancing work, Darmstadt/Berlin
• 2004 - 2009: PhD (Bioinformatics/Computational biology) in the group of Peer Bork, EMBL, Heidelberg
• 1999 - 2004: Studies of Biochemistry and Computer Science, University of Greifswald, including stays in Switzerland and USA

Five selected positions / activities

• Speaker of the NFDI4Microbiota Consortium
• Member of the Executive Council of The Carpentries
• Member and speaker working group Digital tools - software and services as part of the focus iniative "Digital informartion" of the Alliance of Science Organisations in Germany
• Member of the Advisory Board of the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society - The German Internet Institute
• Founding member of the German speaking Open Science working group of the Open Knowledge Foundation

Links

• ORCID identifier: 0000-0002-1481-2996; further information/statistics regarding my publications can also be found on my Google Scholar, Impact Story or Scholia profile.
• Source code repositories on GitHub: research group account / personal account
• Peer-Review activities documented at Publons.
• Slides of selected talks at Speaker Deck.
• I am co-host of the podcast Open Science Radio. As the name implies we cover open science and related topics.
• Further information about previous positions and activities on Xing and LinkedIn
• Twitter and Mastodon accounts
• Selected videos:
  • Workshop (in German) WikiCite 2020 hands-on: Wikidata-Einführung as part of the WikiCite 2020
  • Talk (in German) Open Access als Grundlage von Open Science as part of the Open-Access-Roadshow Schleswig-Holstein 2019
  • New deals on data: Generating open knowledge on closed data at the Blockchain For Science Con 2018

Contact

Simply send me a friendly e-mail. If needed use my PGP key 0xc170f2f83e02d9a1 to encrypt the message. Find more crypto-goodness on keybase.