Nikolaus Fortelny

Associate Professor

Nikolaus studied molecular biology at the University of Vienna (B.Sc.), and bioinformatics at the University of Geneva (M.Sc.). He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia (UBC) Vancouver, where he was co-supervised by Chris Overall and Paul Pavlidis. During his doctoral studies he was the first to study and describe broad regulatory interactions between proteases in the so-called "protease web", which he achieved through computational analyses of proteomics and transcriptomics data. In the Bock lab, Nikolaus expanded this work, studying various biological processes that mediate both intra- and inter-cellular signalling. His research focus was on combining multi-omics (transcriptomics and epigenomics), single-cell data with network biology based on advanced machine-learning algorithms such as deep learning. He thereby contributed to various biomedical areas, including immune functions of structural cells, treatment of diabetes, leukaemia and other cancers, and JAK-STAT signalling. On September 1st 2020, Nikolaus moved to the University of Salzburg to start a new research group in Computational Systems Biology.