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 provide research data infrastructure and run projects that use and extend the knowledge commons by making research outcomes more open and FAIR for example using Knowledge Graphs. 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 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

Selected positions / activities

• Speaker of the NFDI4Microbiota Consortium
• Member and speaker working group Digital tools and their development, including artificial intelligence and machine learning as part of the focus iniative "Digitality in science" of the Alliance of Science Organisations in Germany
• 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.
• Wikidata item identifier: Q18744528
• Source code repositories on Codeberg (research group account / personal account) and on GitHub (research group account / personal account)
• I am co-host of the podcast Open Science Radio. As the name implies we cover open science and related topics.
• My Mastodon profile
• Further information about previous positions and activities on LinkedIn

Contact

Simply send me a friendly e-mail. If needed use my PGP key 0xc170f2f83e02d9a1 to encrypt the message.