Markus Ankenbrand

Dr. Markus Ankenbrand is a Group Leader in BioMedical Data Science at the Center for Computational and Theoretical Biology (CCTB) at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg. He holds a PhD in Biology and Informatics from the same university, completed at the Graduate School of Life Sciences. His research focuses on developing algorithms and tools for biomedical data analysis, with a current emphasis on multi-modal methods and machine learning model interpretability.

• Positions:
  • 2020–present: Group Leader, BioMedical Data Science, CCTB
  • 2019–2020: Group Leader, Computational Cardiology, Universitätsklinikum Würzburg
  • 2018–2019: PostDoc, MIT, Boston

Research Interests: His work spans bioinformatics, computational biology, medical imaging analysis, and machine learning applications in healthcare. Key projects include deep learning models for cardiac MRI segmentation and integrative genomics in ocean ecosystems.

Publications: Over 25 peer-reviewed articles since 2013, with recent contributions on prostate cancer detection via PET/CT, influenza RNA visualization, and cardiac function modeling in large animal studies.

Education:

• Bachelor of Biology (2009–2012), University of Würzburg
• Master of Biology (2012–2014), University of Würzburg
• Bachelor of Informatics (2011–2015), University of Würzburg
• PhD (2014–2017), Graduate School of Life Sciences, University of Würzburg
• Bachelor of Computational Mathematics (2020–2023), University of Würzburg

Labs/Teams: Leads the BioMedical Data Science group at CCTB, collaborating with institutions worldwide on projects like myocardial pathology segmentation benchmarks (MyoPS) and ecological trait data standards.