Florian Breitwieser, PhD

About me

I am a postdoctoral fellow in the group of Prof Steven Salzberg at the Center for Computational Biology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine since February 2015.

My research in Steven Salzberg's group is centered around computational metagenomics, and the human microbiome in health and disease. I am very interested both in the computer science and biology perspective of the research.

My main projects are:

• Discovery of pathogens in the cerospinal fluid and brain biopsy of patients with neuroimmune disorders (in collaboration with Carlos Pardo-Villamizar, MD, Director of the JH Transverse Myelitis Center)
• Development of Centrifuge, a fast and accurate metagenomics classification program (with Daehwan Kim and Li Song)
• Understanding the skin microbiome through the integration of metagenomics, bioinformatics, spatial ecology, and synthetic biology (in collaboration with groups at the JHU Applied Physics Laboratory, Duke University, and University of Maryland)

STAMPS 2016 presentation

My doctoral resarch was in the field of computational proteomics at the Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (CeMM). I received my PhD degree in the program Medical Informatics, Biostatistics and Complex Systems from the Medical University of Vienna in 2014. My supervisor was Jacques Colinge, at that time head of the Bioinformatics Dept. at CeMM, now adjunct PI at CeMM and professor at the University of Montepellier and the Institute of Cancer Research of Montpellier.