Dr. Christian Mertes

Workflow coordinator German Human Genome-Phenome Archive, Munich Data Science Institute, Technical University of Munich

Dr. Christian Mertes is the workflow workstream coordinator at the German Human Genome-Phenome Archive (GHGA) and a member of the Munich Data Science Institute (MDSI) at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). Within the GHGA, the German node of the federated European Genome-Phenome Archive (EGA), he is responsible for the development, standardization, and harmonization of next-generation sequencing (NGS) data processing. He is also involved in the establishment of the Munich node, one of the six evolving data hubs in Germany hosting and processing GHGA data.

Christian Mertes studied bioinformatics in Munich at TUM and Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU). He received his PhD in (bio)informatics in 2021 from the Department of Informatics at TUM while working in the chair of Computational Molecular Medicine. His focus was on statistical methods for finding outliers in RNA sequencing data to aid in the diagnosis of rare diseases. During his PhD, Christian Mertes co-developed OUTRIDER, a tool for detecting aberrant gene expression, FRASER, a tool for detecting aberrant splicing events, and DROP, an automated workflow for analyzing RNA-seq data to aid clinicians in diagnosis, which are now widely adopted by the rare disease community worldwide.