Staff

Prof. Dr. Dr. Fabian Theis
Institute Director and Research Group Leader
Phone: +49 89 3187-43260
E-mail
Building/Room: 58a / 112
Fabian Theis uses artificial intelligence to unlock the secrets of human cells. How do they interact and what goes wrong with diseases at the cellular level? Single cell sequencing allows him and his team to analyse and model single cell heterogeneities, as well as using machine and deep learning for prediction in biology and biomedicine.
CURRICULUM VITAE
Fabian Theis is head of the Computational Health Center at Helmholtz Munich and holds the chair "Mathematical Modeling of Biological Systems" at the Department of Mathematics of the Technical University of Munich. He is director of HelmholtzAI and Associate Faculty at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute since 2019 as well as member and/or coordinator of various initiatives:
- SingleCellOmics Germany (SCOG) network - founder (launched 2018)
- Munich School for Data Science (MUDS) - coordinator (launched 2019)
- Helmholtz AI platform - scientific director (launched 2019)
- ELLIS Munich unit - co-director (launched 2020)
- Bavarian AI council - co-chair (launched 2021)
Fabian holds MSc degrees in Mathematics and Physics (University of Regensburg, 2000) a PhD degree in Physics from the same university (2002) and a PhD in Computer Science (University of Granada, 2003). In 2017, he was awarded the Erwin Schrödinger prize together within an interdisciplinary team at the ETH Zürich.
He has been working as visiting researcher at the department of Architecture and Computer Technology (University of Granada, Spain), at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute (Wako, Japan), at FAMU-FSU (Florida State University, USA) and at TUAT's Laboratory for Signal and Image Processing (Tokyo, Japan).
As a principal researcher, he led the 'Signal processing & information theory' group at the Institute of Biophysics in Regensburg, Germany. In 2006, he headed a junior research group as Bernstein fellow at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, within the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organisation in Göttingen. 2007, he became working group head of CMB at the Institute of Bioinformatics at Helmholtz Munich. Two years later, he became Associate Professor for Mathematics in Systems Biology at TU Munich. From 2009 to 2014 he was also member of the ‘Young Academy’ (founded by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina) and in 2010 he was awarded an ERC starting grant. In 2021 he was awarded the Hamburg Science price - the highest endowed price by a german science academy.
Selected Publications
Bergen, V., Lange, M., Peidli, S., Wolf F.A., Theis,F.J. Generalizing RNA velocity to transient cell states through dynamical modeling. Nature Biotechnology. doi:10.1038/s41587-020-0591-3 (2020). For press release click here
Sachs S, Bastidas-Ponce, A, Tritschler, S, [...]., Tschöp, MH, Theis, FJ°, Hofmann, SM°, Müller, TD°, Lickert, H°. Targeted pharmacological therapy restores β-cell function for diabetes remission. Nature Metabolism 2, 192–209 (2020). For press release click here
Lotfollahi, M, Wolf, FA and Theis, FJ. scGen predicts single-cell perturbation responses. Nature Methods 16, 715–721 (2019). For press release click here
Fischer, DS, Fiedler, AK, Kernfeld, E, Genga, RM, Hasenauer, J, Maehr, R., Theis, FJ. Inferring population dynamics from single-cell RNA-sequencing time series data. Nature Biotechnology 37, 461–468 (2019). For press release click here
Wolf, F, Angerer, P, Theis, FJ. SCANPY: Large-scale single-cell gene expression data analysis. Genome Biology 19, 15 (2019). (ranked most cited paper that year from Gen Biol). For press release click here
Buggenthin, F, Buettner, F, Hoppe, PS, Endele, M, Kroiss, M, Strasser, M, Schwarzfischer, M, Loeffler, D, Kokkaliaris, KD, Hilsenbeck, O, Schroeder, T°, Theis, FJ°, Marr, C°. Prospective identification of hematopoietic lineage choice by deep learning. Nature Methods 14 403–406 (2017). For press release click here
Haghverdi, L, Buettner, M, Wolf FA , Buettner F, Theis FJ. Diffusion pseudotime robustly reconstructs lineage branching. Nature Methods 13, 845–848 (2016). For press release click here
° joint corresponding authors
Selected News (since 2019)
11.11.2020 A strong ecosystem for the “AI of the future” on a European Level
06.11.2020 Fabian Theis: The data juggler
15.09.2020 Munich joins the ELLIS unit network to help shape the future of AI in Europe
03.08.2020 AI & single-cell genomics: New software predicts cell fate
17.06.2020 Helmholtz funds 19 AI projects to solve urgent grand challenges
16.04.2020 Why smokers, men, and older people tend to be more severely affected by COVID-19?
20.02.2020 New drug combination restores beta cell function in animal model: potential for diabetes remission
26.03.2019 Helmholtz: New AI flagship unit in Munich to strengthen its Germany-wide research network