Prof. Dr. Dr. Fabian Theis

Academic career and research areas

Fabian Theis uses artificial intelligence to uncover the secrets of human cells. How do they interact and what's going wrong at the cellular level when someone falls ill? By using single-cell sequencing data, he and his team are able to model the variety of cells and their activities. Machine learning and deep learning are also used to help make predictions in biology and biomedicine.

Fabian holds two Master's Degrees in Mathematics and Physics, as well as two Doctorates in Physics and Computer Science.

Fabian’s career began as head of the research group “Signal Processing and Information Theory” at the Institute for Biophysics in Regensburg. As a Bernstein Fellow, he led a junior researcher group at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen in 2006. One year later he became head of a task force at the Institute for Bioinformatics at Helmholtz Munich, and then after two years he was appointed Extracurricular Professor for Mathematics in System Biology at the Technical University of Munich.

Fabian then served as a guest scientist at various international institutes, such as the Department of Architecture and Computer Technology of the University of Granada, Spain; the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Wako, Japan; FAMU/FSU in Florida, USA; and TUAT’s Laboratory for Signal and Image Processing in Tokyo, Japan.

Fabian now leads the Computational Health Center at Helmholtz Munich, where six institutes are researching the relationship between artificial intelligence and health. He also chairs the Mathematical Modeling of Biological Systems program at the Technical University of Munich. As Science Director at HelmholtzAI, Fabian Theis coordinates various initiatives and networks, including:

• Analysis Working Group of the Human Cell Atlas
• Network “SingleCellOmics Germany” (SCOG)
• Munich School for Data Science (MUDS)
• ELLIS Munich for outstanding researchers