Alexander Sczyrba

Alexander Sczyrba

To Be Confirmed

Prof. Alexander Sczyrba is the leader of the Computational Metagenomics group at the University of Bielefeld. He obtained is Diploma in Computer Science in the Natural Sciences in 1998 followed by a PhD in bioinformatics in 2007 from the University of Bielefeld. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the DOE Joint Genome Institute in the USA, Alexander Sczyrba came back to Bielefeld he became the head of the Bielefeld University Bioinformatics Services and Computational Metagenomics groups.

Dr. Alexander Sczyrba is a metagenomic specialist, the direct analysis of DNA from a whole environmental community, and tackles challenges such as the assembly of metagenomic datasets. Dr. Alexander Sczyrba and his team are developing new tools and approaches for the metagenomic assembly problem and notably high-throughput gene-centric and de-novo assembly pipelines.

Dr. Sczyrba is also interested in single cell genomics, a complementary approach to sequencing the DNA of a whole microbial community. For single cell genomics, they develop automated bioinformatic pipelines that support each step of the analysis.

Furthermore, Dr. Sczyrba is one of the contributor and organizer of the Critical Assessment of Metagenome Interpretation (CAMI) challenge, which is a community-led initiative aiming for an independent, comprehensive and bias-free evaluation of metagenomic methods.