Christoph Bock is a German bioinformatician and principal investigator at the Research Center for Molecular Medicine ( CeMM) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and a visiting professor at the

Medical University of Vienna The Medical University of Vienna (German: ''Medizinische Universität Wien'') is a public university located in Vienna, Austria. It is the direct successor to the faculty of medicine at the University of Vienna, founded in 1365 by Rudolf IV, Duk ...

Education

Bock carried out his undergraduate studies at the University of Mannheim, focusing on computer science and business information, with an emphasis on machine learning. Bock gained his PhD in 2008 from Saarland University for research carried out at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics on

computational epigenetics Computational epigenetics uses statistical methods and mathematical modelling in epigenetic research. Due to the recent explosion of epigenome datasets, computational methods play an increasing role in all areas of epigenetic research. Definition ...

supervised by Thomas Lengauer.

Research and career

Following his PhD, he undertook postdoctoral research with Alexander Meissner at the Broad Institute, where he contributed to the NIH Roadmap Epigenomics Project. Bock joined CeMM as a principal investigator in 2012. His research focuses on the application of machine learning and

biostatistics Biostatistics (also known as biometry) are the development and application of statistical methods to a wide range of topics in biology. It encompasses the design of biological experiments, the collection and analysis of data from those experime ...

to computational epigenetics. He is also interested in the application of bioinformatics to epigenetic diagnosis and

personalised medicine Personalized medicine, also referred to as precision medicine, is a medical model that separates people into different groups—with medical decisions, practices, interventions and/or products being tailored to the individual patient based on thei ...

. Bock's lab has explored integrating technologies to efficiently assess the impact of many genes in gene regulation. His lab has combined

CRISPR CRISPR () (an acronym for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) is a family of DNA sequences found in the genomes of prokaryotic organisms such as bacteria and archaea. These sequences are derived from DNA fragments of bacte ...

genome editing with single-cell RNA-seq to create the CROP-seq method, which enables high-throughput analysis of gene regulation. Beyond his work at CeMM, he has also been a principal investigator of BLUEPRINT, a member organisation of the International Human Epigenome Consortium.

Awards and honors

Bock was awarded the Otto Hahn Medal by the

Max Planck Society The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science (german: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e. V.; abbreviated MPG) is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German research institutes. ...

in 2009: this award recognises outstanding PhD theses. In 2017, Bock was awarded the Overton Prize by the International Society for Computational Biology, for his significant contributions to

computational biology Computational biology refers to the use of data analysis, mathematical modeling and computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer science, biology, and big data, the field also has fo ...

research. , Bock serves on the editorial board of the '' Genome Biology'' journal.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bock, Christoph German bioinformaticians Living people Overton Prize winners Date of birth missing (living people) Year of birth missing (living people)