UNIVERSITY OF COLOGNE

Michael Nothnagel has studied Mathematics and Biology, including a specialization on statistics and stochastics, at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. After two extended research visits to the Rockefeller University, New York, NY, and Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, he received his PhD in Statistical Genetics from Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany, in collaboration with the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine Berlin-Buch (MDC). He then moved to the University of Kiel, Germany, for a postdoc position, where he received his habilitation in Medical Statistics. In 2012, he became head of the Statistical Genetics/Bioinformatics group at the Cologne Center for Genomics (CCG) at the University of Cologne.

Michael Nothnagel works on a range of statistical aspects in the analysis of (mostly human) genetic data, including both methods development and application. This includes topics in genetic epidemiology, such as confounding by correlation structures in the genome and novel analysis methods for sequencing data, but also applications to a broad spectrum of diseases, e.g. epilepsies, Dupuytren's diseases, and others. It also includes genetics studies of human populations, for example on Europeans, Native South Americans, Iranians and collections of ancient DNA (aDNA) samples. Finally, he contributes to statistical aspects in forensic genetics, e.g. optimal marker selection procedures and issues in forensic DNA phenotyping.