Team
Lab leadership
Prof. Dr. Jakob Nikolas Kather, MSc
Jakob holds dual appointments as full professor of medicine and computer science at the Else Kroener Fresenius Center for Digital Health at Technical University Dresden, Germany, serves as a senior physician in medical oncology at the University Hospital Dresden and holds an additional affiliation with the National Center for Tumor Diseases in Heidelberg. His research is focused on applications of AI in medicine, in particular precision oncology. His work is supported by numerous European and national grants, which enable the team to develop new deep learning methods for medical data analysis techniques and to apply them in precision oncology. Jakob’s publications are listed on Google Scholar and Pubmed. Jakob’s CV is available here.
Dr. Zunamys I. Carrero
Zunamys is a scientist with a PhD in Biochemistry specialized in Molecular Oncology. She is part of the lab’s leadership team since 2022, managing all collaboration projects, scientific staff as well as the overall strategy of the team. She has years of experience working in the field of Precision Oncology, developing automated workflows for the generation of patient derived tumor models for High-Throughput drug screens. She has worked closely with clinicians to aid them in the interpretation of drug-response data, as well as with experimental designs tailored to their patient’s needs.
Team leads
Dr. Oliver Lester Saldanha
Oliver leads the Decentralized AI team in the Kather Lab. He is focussing on building multi-input multi-output models for the development of new artificial intelligence-based biomarkers in various cancer types, using decentralized learning approaches such as federated learning and swarm learning. He coordinates various international research consortia on real-world implementation of decentralized AI in healthcare. You can find Oliver’s published research on Pubmed.
Dr. Marta Ligero Hernandez
Marta is a postdoctoral researcher leading our Radiology core team efforts. She is a Biomedical engineer with a PhD specialised in machine learning applied to routine medical imaging for immunotherapy at Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO). Her main interest is in multimodal applications combining radiology, histopathology and clinical data for improving cancer treatment response prediction. With that purpose, Marta leads multi-centric collaborations within European consortiums like TANGERINE. You can find Marta’s published research on Pubmed.
Dr. Narmin Ghaffari Laleh
Narmin is a research scientist and education team lead in our group. She has years of experience in data science, including industry experience in the life science area. Her responsibilities include development and improvement of our artificial intelligence pipeline. Her scientific interest is in new AI technologies, including generative models such as text-to-image models. Narmin is co-mentored by Prof. Dr. Volkmar Schulz from RWTH Aachen University. Narmin joined the Kather Lab in 2020. You can find Narmin’s published research on Pubmed.
Dr. med. Isabella Wiest
Isabella joined the team in August 2023 as part of a reserach collaboration with Mannheim University Hospital of Heidelberg University. As a trained and practicing medical doctor she has a strong interest in improving patient care by applying digitalization strategies. In our group, she leads the natural language processing team, making use of the wide treasure of unstructured health care data by means of large language models (LLMs). Her projects are driven by her knowledge and experience as a physician in gastroenterology at the Mannheim University Hospital as well as her practical experience in medical informatics. She additionally holds a MSc in Health Economics from Heidelberg University.
Omar S. M. El Nahhas, MSc
Omar is a computer scientist who joined our team in 2022 as a PhD student. In our lab, he leads the computational pathology research team. His research focuses on improving the performance and interpretability of deep learning in clinical artificial intelligence. In addition, he is an entrepreneur and leads our group’s efforts to create scientific output with real-world impact. He is co-supervised by Prof. Dr. Ivo Sbalzarini from the faculty of Computer Science at TU Dresden.
Michaela Unger, MSc
Michaela joined the Kather Lab as a PhD candidate in 2022. In our group, she leads the genomics research team. She has a background in both molecular biology and computational science. The passion for interdisciplinary research brought her into the field of medical AI. Before, she used neural networks to address mutagenesis processes in cancer. In our group, her focus is to connect histopathology, her genomics knowledge and machine learning in order to build clinically relevant models.
Researchers and software engineers
Dr. Hannah Sophie Muti
Hannah joined the lab in 2018. She is a surgeon-scientist with a strong interest in cancer and histopathology and is working on detecting predictive biomarkers in gastric cancer. She is also a power user of QuPath and is an active part of the QuPath community. Hannah is co-mentored by Prof. Dr. Nadine Gaisa at Ulm University Hospital. Find Hannah on Pubmed.
Dr. Chiara M. L. Loeffler
Chiara is a physician-scientist who joined the lab in 2018. In her projects, she explores a pan-cancer perspective of deep learning based biomarkers. She is experienced in histopathology and cancer genomics in many tumor types. Also, Chiara has more than a year of experience in handling large clinical data sets of cancer patients. Chiara is co-mentored by Dr. Nadina Ortiz-Bruechle at RWTH University Hospital Aachen. Find Chiara on Pubmed.
Didem Cifci, MSc
Didem is a PhD student who joined the Kather Lab in 2021. Originally coming from a molecular biology and genetics background, Didem is also a programmer with years of software engineering experience. Thus, she bridges the worlds of molecular biology and computer science to advance the mission of the Kather laboratory. Her scientific focus is to use AI to decipher intratumor heterogeneity. Didem is co-supervised by Prof. Dr. Nadine Gaisa from the Institute of Pathology at Ulm University Hospital.
Vidhya Sainath, MSc
Vidhya (Srividhya) joined the team in 2023, having graduated from the faculty of Computer Science at TU Dresden. Being a truly interdisciplinary biologist - computer scientist, she brings profound knowledge in cancer genomics, bioinformatics, high performance computing, deep learning architectures and data integration. She is involved in many of our lab’s core efforts in deep learning for genomics, image analysis and multimodal models.
Arianna Bonetti, MSc
Arianna joined the lab in 2024 as a doctoral candidate, bringing a background in biotechnology (BSc) and biology (MSc). Her research interests lie in the intersection of genomics and deep learning, with the goal of expanding the applications of AI in genomic analysis. Her past experiences include research activities in genomics and a research fellowship focused on drug repurposing using AI, where she developed new approaches to integrating large-scale genomic data with predictive modeling techniques. She is also a member of the ONCOnnect consortium.
Dyke Ferber
Dyke is a clinician-scientist based in Heidelberg and Dresden who joined the team in 2023. He combines medical oncology expertise with advanced programming skills. He develops software based on large language models (LLMs) focused on retrieval augmented generation (RAG), in-context learning, multimodal LLMs and autonomous AI agents. Find Dyke on Pubmed.
Lars Hilgers
Lars is a clinician-scientist who joined the lab in 2021. For his MD thesis he worked on novel tumor suppressor genes in breast cancer, where he acquired a solid background in molecular biology, epigenetics and histology. Currently his focus lies on the use of large language models and agentic workflows within the medical setting as well as leveraging deep learning models for genomics.
Jan Clusmann, MD
Jan is a clinician-scientist and postdoctoral researcher who joined the lab in 2023. With a background as a practicing MD, wet-lab researcher, self-taught programmer and experience in handling large population-based cohorts, he leads our efforts on developing clinical risk stratification and prevention tools for hepatobiliary cancers, a collaborative effort with the group of Prof. Carolin Schneider at RWTH Aachen. Additionally, Jan works on our NLP team, exploring the potential of LLMs for medical data processing and decision making. Find Jan on Pubmed or Google Scholar.
Tim Lenz, MSc
Tim graduated from TU Dresden with a Master’s in Computer Science in 2023 and subsequently joined the team as a PhD student. His main interest is methods development for foundation models in cancer histopathology and multimodal data integration in oncology. He drives our lab’s efforts to develop and deploy deep learning pipelines for self-supervised learning on our university’s high-performance computing cluster and on our own hardware.
Fabian Wolf, MSc
Fabian is a graduate in computer science who joined the team in 2023 as a PhD student. His main interest is to develop software pipelines for explainable deep learning in computational pathology as well as pipelines for natural language processing tasks using open source large language models. In addition, he maintains our lab’s computing cluster.
Marko van Treeck, MSc
Marko joined the team in 2019. He graduated in Computer Science from RWTH Aachen University (co-supervisor: Prof. Dr. Bastian Leibe) and is a research software engineer and research scientist in our lab. He is interested in making deep learning workflows more efficient and more powerful by using dimensionality reduction for gigapixel images in cancer histology. Furthermore, he develops software pipelines for natural language processing.
Li Zhang, MSc
Li joined the team as a software engineer in 2024. She graduated from TU Dresden with the major of Computational Modelling and Simulation. She has profound experience in computer vision, model compression and database. Her interest is to apply deep learning techniques to clinical domain, especially research on AI agents, foundation models for genomics and histopathology. She develops and extends modular pipelines for genomics team.
Gregory Veldhuizen, MD, PhD
Gregory joined the lab at the end of 2021. He is a post-doctoral physician-scientist with strong programming skills and expertise in the applications of machine learning in clinical practice. His previous research at Maastricht University straddles the fields of cardiovascular medicine, endocrinology and nephrology. You can find Gregory’s published research on Pubmed.
Xiaofeng Jiang, MD
Xiaofeng is a surgeon-scientist who joined the team in 2022. He is part of our group as a PhD student. He is fluent in Python and has extensive experience in radiology image processing. His current interest is to develop multi-modal AI models for survival prediction in colorectal cancer. He is co-supervised by Prof. Dr. Daniel Truhn from University Hospital Aachen.
Asier Rabasco Meneghetti, PhD
Asier joined the lab in 2023. He is a postdoctoral scientist with a physics background and radiology and machine learning expertise. His previous research at the University of Dresden focused on image and -omics integration for cancer outcome prediction. His current projects are related to end-to-end Deep Learning for radiology image analysis.
Marco Gustav, MSc
Marco, a PhD candidate in our lab since 2022, trained as an engineer in Hannover, Germany. His research focuses on explainability and bias in computational pathology and large language models. Beyond his work as a skilled science communicator, Marco actively contributes to teaching, student mentoring, and event organization, applying his broad skill set as a generalist in various roles.
Katherine Jane Hewitt, MD
Kat is a PhD student who completed two years of histopathology training in the UK before joining Kather Lab. Her projects are driven by her histomorphological knowledge in combination with her translational research expertise. She has a particular research interest in neuropathology and after completing her PhD, Kat plans to continue her research as a pathology clinician scientist across Kather Lab and Uniklinikum Dresden. Ultimately, she aims to become an interdisciplinary expert in computational pathology.
Jan Niehues, PhD
Jan is a medical student with a PhD in physics who joined the lab in 2019. He is building expertise in histopathology images, cancer genomics and is optimizing computational workflows of deep learning. As a proficient programmer with many years of experience, he is heavily involved in training other lab members in Python and Groovy programming.
Jie Fu (Jeff) Zhu, MSc
Jeff joined the Kather Lab as a research software engineer and PhD student in 2022. He is a Master’s graduate from Technical University of Berlin and University of Rennes 1. His Major was in in Cloud Network Infrastructure. He had several internships working on computer vision applications, project maintenance, and java web application development. His mission in the lab is to contribute and extend our Deep Learning software pipelines.
Laura Zigutyte, MSc
Laura joined the Kather Lab in April 2023 as a PhD candidate with a background in biotechnology (BSc) and molecular bioengineering (MSc). She is experienced in bioimage analysis, particularly deep learning based computer vision, and scientific software development for computational biology. In addition, she has some experience in medical AI gained through an internship. In the lab, Laura aims to apply her expertise in image analysis to develop deep learning pipelines for histopathology, and to delve into the explainable AI field.
Radhika Juglan, MSc
Radhika joined the Kather Lab in April 2023 as a PhD candidate with a background in physics. Her focus is to fundamentally improve Deep Learning methods in clinical artificial intelligence with applications in radiology and histopathology images. She is co-supervised by Prof. Sayan Mukherjee from the University of Leipzig.
Leo Misera, MSc
LLeo joined Kather Lab in 2023 with experience in deep learning from both industry and academia. He addresses clinical challenges such as improving diagnosis or predicting treatment response through radiology image analysis using deep learning. Leo is not only an active contributor to the radiology subgroup’s code-base, but also manages the collaboration between our lab and the Dresden University Hospital’s radiology department.
Dr. med. Marie Lessmann
Marie joined the team in October 2023 as part of a research collaboration with the Thoracic Oncology Group (supervisor: Prof. Wermke) at the NCT, University Hospital of Dresden. She is a resident in hematology/oncology with a strong interest in histopathology in lung cancer and digital oncology. Her project focuses on creating an interdisciplinary AI augmented platform to analyze Immunofluorescence (IF) Multiplex stains obtained from lung cancer tissue biopsies. Also, she aims to improve patient outcomes by structuring clinical health data using large language models (LLMs).
Dr. med. Sven Nebelung
Sven joined the team in 2024 as a part-time researcher in Deep Learning for radiology. As a board-certified radiologists, he supports our radiology core team to address clinically relevant questions in Deep Learning-based biomarker development. He is also a key part of our mission to build and evaluate foundation models for radiology.
Students
Esther Stueker
Esther is a medical student who joined the team in April 2024. She is pursuing her medical doctorate in the lab, focusing on Large Language Models with vision capabilities and their potential applications in the field of surgery.
Peter Neidlinger
Peter is a medical student with a background in computer programming. He is currently doing a six-month internship in the Kather Lab, mainly focusing on foundation models in histopathology.
Emylou Matthaei, BSc
Emylou is a dental student who joined the lab in 2022. Before studying Dentistry, she earned a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and acquired hands-on experience in statistics and quantitative research methods. Having a special interest in the application of AI-methods on oral pathology data, she currently works with image data of oral mucosa lesions.
Kevin Pfeiffer
Kevin is a medical student with years of experience in computer programming. He works together with Oliver Saldanha to maintain and extend our Swarm Learning platform for clinical AI.
Carl
Carl is a computer science and medical student who joined the genomics research team in spring 2024 to complete his Bachelor’s thesis in computer science. His research focuses on applying Large DNA-Language Models to enhance personalized tumor diagnosis and treatment. In the lab, Carl is particularly interested in advancing multi-modal tumor classification models and AI explainability within the genomics field.
Associate Lab Members
Dr. med. Tobias P. Seraphin
Tobias is a resident physician and researcher at the Department of Gastroenterology at the University Hospital Duesseldorf. He is affiliated with our group as a visiting member since mid-2021. Tobias is part of the DEEP LIVER consortium and his mission is to use AI for outcome prediction in liver disease. His primary supervisor is Prof. Dr. Tom Luedde from the University Hospital Duesseldorf. Find his published research on Pubmed.
Dr. med. Fiona Kolbinger
Fiona is a physician-scientist at the Department of Surgery at University Hospital Dresden. She has a broad interest and expertise in using artificial intelligence for improved data analysis and clinical decisions in abdominal surgery. Many of her projects are related to the analysis of laparoscopy videos. Find her published research on Pubmed.
Alumni of the international internship programme
Dr. Thomas Sorz (Spring 2024) from Medical University of Vienna, Austria
Dr. Benedict Kinny-Koester (Spring 2024) from Heidelberg University, Germany
Dr. med. Kien Vu Trung (Summer 2023) from Leipzig University, Germany
Georg Woelflein (Summer 2023) from University of St Andrews, UK
Caroline Montag (Summer 2023) from University of Chicago, USA
Andrew Srisuwananukorn, MD (Summer 2023) from Mount Sinai, NY, USA
Dr. Alistair Curd (Winter 2023) from University of Leeds, UK
Yoni Schirris, MSc (Summer 2022) from NKI, NL
Bonniee Chatterji, MSc (Summer 2022) from University of Aberdeen, UK
Sophia J. Wagner, MSc (Summer 2022) from Helmholtz Zentrum Munich, Germany
Alumni of the group
Nafisa Anjum, BSc (TU Dresden) was part of the lab as a student assistant from 2023-2024.
Tobias Seibel, MSc (RWTH Aachen University) was part of the lab as a student assistant from 2020-2023.
Dr. med. Peter L. Schrammen (RWTH Aachen University) was part of the lab as a PostDoc from 2020-2022 and published research about weakly supervised Deep Learning in colorectal cancer.
Virginia Ardévol Martinez, MSc (Maastricht University) was part of the lab as a visiting student from 2020-2022 and published research about game theoretic models of cancer.
Georgia Liapi, MSc (Maastricht University) sucessfully finished her MSc thesis in our lab in 2020.
Lena Anna Pakulla, MSc (RWTH Aachen University) was part of the lab as a scientific coordinator from 2019-2022.
Celine Nicole Heinz (RWTH Aachen University) was part of the lab as a medical doctoral student from 2020-2022 and published research about AI in computational pathology. Find Celine on Pubmed.
Dr. med. Jeremias Krause (RWTH Aachen University) was part of the lab as a medical doctoral student from 2019-2021 and his MD thesis in 2023. Find Jeremias on Pubmed.
Dr. med. Amelie Echle (RWTH Aachen University) was part of the lab as a medical doctoral student from 2019-2022 and published large-scale studies on AI in colorectal cancer histopathology. Find Amelie on Pubmed.
Additional students
Students who were supervised and/or examined by Prof. Kather are listed here