Team

Active team

Jakob Prof. Dr. Jakob Nikolas Kather, MSc
Jakob (ORCID) is a physician/scientist and full professor at Technical University Dresden (Germany). He is based at the Else Kroener Fresenius Center for Digital Health and has additional affiliations at the NCT Heidelberg and the University of Leeds (UK). His research is focused on applications of AI in medicine, in particular precision oncology. Jakob routinely reviews scientific articles (Publons), is an editorial board member at Immunoinformatics and an Associate Editor at npj precision oncology and AACR’s Cancer Research Communications. His publications are listed on Google Scholar and Pubmed.

Zunamys 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, 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.

Narmin Ghaffari Laleh, MSc Narmin
Narmin is a full-time research scientist and software engineer 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.

Oliver Lester Saldanha, MSc Oliver
Oliver is a research scientist and PhD student 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. Also, he coordinates the Swarm Learning activities in the Kather Lab. He is co-supervised by Prof. Dr. Andreas Schuppert at the “Joint Research Center for Computational Biomedicine” at RWTH Aachen. You can find Oliver’s published research on Pubmed.

Omar El Nahhas, MSc Omar
Omar is a computer scientist who joined our team in 2022 as a PhD student. 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. Sayan Mukherjee from Leipzig University.

Didem Cifci, MSc Narmin
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 RWTH University Hospital.

Hannah Sophie Muti Hannah
Hannah joined the lab in 2018. She is a physician-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 RWTH University Hospital. Find Hannah on Pubmed.

Chiara Loeffler Chiara
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 and Prof. Dr. Nadine Gaisa at RWTH University Hospital Aachen. Find Chiara on Pubmed.

Katherine Jane Hewitt, MD Kat
Kat is a PhD student who joined the Kather Lab in 2021. She is a histopathology trainee in the UK, aiming to become an interdisciplinary expert in computational pathology. Her projects are driven by her histomorphological knowledge and translational research expertise. She has a particular research interest in explainable AI and the tumor microenvironment.

Jan Niehues, PhD default
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.

Marko van Treeck, MSc default
Marko 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. Marko leads the development of our current image analysis pipeline DeepMed

Gregory Veldhuizen, MD, PhD default
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
Xiaofeng is a medical doctor who 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 PD Dr. Daniel Truhn from University Hospital Aachen.

Marco Gustav Marco
Marco is a PhD candidate who joined our lab in 2022. He completed his training as an engineer in Hannover, Germany. His main interest is explainable artificial intelligence in computational pathology. Furthermore, he contributes to managing training and teaching activities of our group.

Michaela Unger Michaela
Michaela joined the Kather Lab as a PhD candidate in 2022. 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.


Students

Emylou Matthaei, BSc Emylou
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.

Lars Hilgersdefault
Lars is a medical student who joined the lab in 2021. For his MD thesis he worked on new tumor suppressor genes in breast cancer in the molecular oncology group in the Department of Pathology, where he acquired a solid background in molecular biology, epigenetics and histology. He is currently extending his expertise on AI and Python and his aim is to further explore medical AI with a special interest in tumor heterogeneity and prognosis prediction.

Tobias Seibel Tobi
Tobias is a physics student at RWTH Aachen who is using Python/Tensorflow for optimizing deep learning in medical imaging. He is training medical team members in computer programming while building his expertise on medical data analysis. Also, he actively contributes to the development and streamlining of our software pipeline.

Kevin Pfeiffer Kevin
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.


Associate Lab Members

Dr. med. Tobias P. Seraphin Tobias
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
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.

Marta Ligero Hernandez Marta
Marta is a PhD student from VHIO in Barcelona (supervised by Dr. Raquel Perez Lopez) who is part of the team as a visiting researcher. Her main interest is to combine radiology and histopathology image data for immunotherapy response prediction in solid tumors.


International internship programme

Yoni Schirris, MSc Yoni is a computer scientist and PhD student at the NKI in Amsterdam. He is visiting the lab in 2022 and working on new multiple instance learning methods for weakly supervised computational pathology.

Dr. Kien Vu Trung Kien is a gastroenterologist and clinical researcher at University Hospital Leipzig. He is visiting the lab in 2022 to work on AI for ultrasound image analysis.


Alumni of the international internship programme

Bonniee Chatterji, MSc (Summer 2022) from University of Aberdeen

Sophia J. Wagner, MSc (Summer 2022) from Helmholtz Zentrum Munich


Lab alumni

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.

Jeremias Krause (RWTH Aachen University) was part of the lab as a medical doctoral student from 2019-2021 and finished the experimental part of his MD thesis in 2021. Find Jeremias on Pubmed.

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.