I am a bioinformatician trained with an emphasis on the interconnection of wet lab research and computational research. My academic and research training included eukaryotic biology, genome research, and wet lab training, in addition to comprehensive training in theoretical and applied bioinformatics to allow fluent communication between wet lab and bioinformatics. My work has focused on the analysis of genomics and transcriptomics data to answer questions in industrial biotechnology, aging, and cardiovascular research. Furthermore, I was part of the team that developed a highly efficient DNA compression and indexing algorithm during an internship at Illumina, Cambridge, UK. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Cologne, Germany, I continued my work on developing reproducible RNA-seq bioinformatics workflows and became interested in circular RNAs (circRNAs), an exciting species of covalently closed RNA molecules that are expressed in diverse cell types but very little is known about functions, potential involvement in disease, and their regulation. I moved to Heidelberg University Hospital, Heidelberg, Germany in 2015 to help establish a bioinformatics research group focusing on computational cardiology and continued my work as postdoctoral fellow. I was responsible for design, setup, and maintenance of a high-performance computer cluster in the Department of Cardiology that is used by the bioinformatics group for collaborations with cardiovascular researchers. I contributed my expertise in transcriptomics data analysis and data visualization to several cardiac-centric studies and followed up on functions and effects of circRNAs in the cardiac context and published the first study of circRNAs in the murine heart. Moreover, while in Heidelberg, I also started developing software and analysis methods for single cell sequencing projects in collaboration with other research groups. In March 2021 I was recruited as a tenure-track in the Department of Internal Medicine and in the new Translational Cardiovascular Research Center (TCRC) at The University of Arizona College of Medicine - Phoenix and established my own research lab. My independent research program develops state-of-the-art computational approaches to answer cardiovascular questions, with a specific interest in the dynamics of circRNAs and RNA biology in health and disease.