Focus of work

Obesity is a major risk factor for diseases such as metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes. Understanding adipogenesis is crucial for the development of more effective therapies against obesity because such therapies are currently largely missing. Although adipogenesis is one of the most investigated cell differentiation processes, little  is known about the mechanisms and dynamics of epigenetic regulation during adipogenesis.

Systems medicine and systems biology are interdisciplinary research fields. Besides the experimental work, there is also a need for computational models. Computational models allow a better understanding of mechanisms and dynamics in biological systems. This goes beyond the determination of correlations and is particularly important if the investigated biological processes are non-linear. Such models also allow testing and developing hypotheses for new experiments in systems that cannot yet be measured experimentally.