Head of the Computational Health Center, Director of the Institute for Computational Biology
Prof. Dr. Dr. Fabian Theis
"With AI, we can imagine a future where diagnosing and treating diseases is more affordable, widely available, and thus more democratic."
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 and machine learning, he and his team are able to model cellular variety and 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. After two years he was then appointed Extracurricular Professor for Mathematics in System Biology at the Technical University of Munich.
Fabian has 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 seven 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
- Single Cell Omics Germany (SCOG)
- Munich School for Data Science (MUDS)
- ELLIS Munich
Focus areas, skills, expertise
Artificial intelligence Big Data Deep learning Machine learning Single-cell analysis Biostatistics Cell mapping Dynamic systems Stochastic modeling
Facts and figures
ERC Advanced Grant 'DeepCell'
aim: predict how cells react to drugs using machine learning
Member of the Board of Directors of the Human Cell Atlas
Hamburg Science Award
for his work on artificial intelligence and analysis processes for large data sets and resolving biomedical questions
Co-chair of the AI council of the Bavarian Ministry for Science and Art
Erwin Schrödinger Award from the Stiftungsverband and the Helmholtz Association
for outstanding interdisciplinary research
Director of the Institute for Computational Biology at Helmholtz Munich
Member of the German National academy of Sciences Leopoldina
...for representing German science abroad and advising lawmakers ans public
Head of junior research group "Computational Modeling in Biology"
Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Award of the German Research Foundation
Big data in medicine
Schwanke meets Science
Key publications
Key publications
Sikkema, L., Ramírez-Suástegui, C., Strobl, D. C., Gillett, T. E., Zappia, L., Madissoon, E., Markov, N. S., Zaragosi, L.-E., Ji, Y., Ansari, M., Arguel, M.-J., Apperloo, L., Banchero, M., Bécavin, C., Berg, M., Chichelnitskiy, E., Chung, M.-I., Collin, A., Gay, A. C. A.,Theis, F. J. 2023. An integrated cell atlas of the lung in health and disease. Nature Medicine, 29(6), 1563–1577. Nature Medicine.
Fischer, D.S., Schaar, A.C. & Theis, F.J. 2022. Modeling intercellular communication in tissues using spatial graphs of cells. Nature Biotechnology.
Palla, G., Spitzer, H., Klein, M., Fischer, D., Schaar, A.C., Kuemmerle, L.B., Rybakov, S., Ibarra, I.L., Holmberg, O., Virshup, I., Lotfollahi, M., Richter, S., Theis, F.J.2022. Squidpy: A Scalable Framework for Spatial Single Cell Analysis. Nature Methods.
Lange, M., Bergen, V., Klein, M., Setty, M., Reuter, B., Bakhti, M, Lickert, H. Ansari, M. Schniering, J. Schuller, H.B., Peér D., Theis F.J. 2022. CellRank for directed single-cell fate mapping. Nature Methods.
Luecken, M.D, Büttner, M. Chaichoompu, K., Danese, A., Interlandi, M., Mueller, M. F., Strobl, D. C., Zappia, L., Dugas, M., Colomé-Tatché, M., Theis, F.J. 2022. Benchmarking atlas-level data integration in single-cell genomics. Nature Methods.
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For the complete list of publications, see Google Scholar
