“I am very pleased that I can support RESIST now to achieve its goals”, says Chris Lauber, who is since mid-June professor for Computational Virology at MHH. Professor Lauber works at the Institute for Experimental Virology at TWINCORE and is the third professor financed by RESIST.
Professor Lauber and his team are bioinfomatically analysing the complex interaction of genetic variations in the human genome. He aims to identify changes in the genome that are related to disease susceptibility or to the course of disease. The 38-year-old is particularly interested in infections by the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which can be severe or even life-threatening in small children. He is working closely with Professor Dr. Gesine Hansen and Professor Dr. Thomas Pietschmann in order to uncover genetic determinants of severe RSV disease progression.
Moreover, Professor Lauber investigates a possible connection of an individual susceptibility by a person’s virom, which is the totality of viruses associated with a human being. In order to link already known and newly discovered viruses with diseases of unknown cause, he, his team and cooperation partners in Heidelberg have recently developed a workflow for high-throughput calculations. “The huge amount of biological data that we analyse in our research requires application of efficient computer-based methods. That is why we use high-performance computers that can run up to 50,000 analyses simultaneously,” explains the researcher.
Chris Lauber studied Bioinformatics in Jena, received his PhD in 2012 in Leiden, Netherlands. He continued his research at the Technical University of Dresden. Since 2017, he also worked for the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg.
Contact: Lauber.Chris@mh-hannover.de