Sven Rahmann

Prof. Sven Rahmann is Chair of Algorithmic Bioinformatics at Saarland University. His research group belongs to the Computer Science Department, the Center for Bioinformatics Saar, the Saarland Informatics Campus, and the PharmaScienceHub. The chair focuses on new algorithms, engineered data structures, and statistical methods for the analysis of latest-generation sequencing data. The group has also worked on integrating multi-modal molecular data (genomics, transcriptomics, epigenomics sequence data; mass spectrometry; ion mobility spectrometry, and others).

Sven is a co-author of the widely used Snakemake workflow management system, which originated in his group (Köster and Rahmann, Bioinformatics, 2012) and has become a de facto standard for reproducible data analysis, and of the Bioconda software distribution for the life sciences. His work has been cited more than 15,000 times so far. In several collaborations, his methods are applied towards medical and biological questions, such as identifying the genetic causes of rare diseases, characterizing tumors and their subtypes (with contributions to the genomic characterization of uveal melanoma and neuroblastoma), and understanding how environmental stress factors affect ecosystems.

Sven chaired WABI 2022 in Potsdam and organized the German Conference on Bioinformatics (GCB) twice: in 2015 in the Ruhr metropolitan area at TU Dortmund, and in 2026 at Saarland University in Saarbrücken. He is or has been an editor with several journals, including IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, BMC Bioinformatics, and PeerJ, and he has served on the program committees of many bioinformatics conferences, including ISMB, RECOMB-seq, WABI, CPM, and GCB. Sven is a board member of the Fachgruppe Bioinformatik (FaBI), the German bioinformatics community organization jointly supported by GI, DECHEMA, and GBM.

Between 2011 and 2021, Sven was Professor for Genome Informatics at the Faculty of Medicine of Duisburg-Essen University, and University Alliance Ruhr Professor for Bioinformatics, funded by Mercator Research Center Ruhr between 2014 and 2019. During this time, he maintained a strong collaboration with the Faculty of Computer Science at TU Dortmund in both research and teaching, and was a principal investigator in the DFG collaborative research center (Sonderforschungsbereich) SFB 876 “Providing Information by Resource-Constrained Data Analysis”.

Between 2007 and 2011, Sven was Professor for Bioinformatics for High-Throughput Technologies at the Chair of Algorithm Engineering, Computer Science Department, TU Dortmund.

In 2007, he spent four months at HHMI Janelia Farm Research Campus as a visiting scientist in Gene Myers’ lab.

From 2004 to 2007, Sven led the independent Junior Research Group “Computational Methods for Emerging Technologies” (COMET) at Bielefeld University, where he was a principal investigator of the Institute of Bioinformatics (IfB) at the Center for Biotechnology (CeBiTec) and part of the faculty of the Graduate School in Bioinformatics and Genome Research.

From 2001 to 2004, Sven wrote his doctoral thesis on oligonucleotide design for microarrays in the Computational Molecular Biology group at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin under the supervision of Martin Vingron.

Sven studied mathematics and computer science with a focus on statistical methods in bioinformatics at the universities of Göttingen, UC Santa Cruz, and Heidelberg. He worked as a freelance programmer for an insurance company and as a student assistant in the Theoretical Bioinformatics group of the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), where he wrote his Diploma (M.Sc.) thesis on word statistics in random texts.