Through my entire life, I have been fascinated by the immune system, since my early childhood when I start reading simple science books, I have always been fascinated by the unbelievable ability of the immune system to identify pathogens, to kill them and to help us recover from the insults and damage caused by these pathogens. After finishing high school, I followed my passion and got accepted at the faculty of Pharmacy where I studied pharmaceutical sciences with a specific focus on microbiology and immunology. During the last year of the five-years pharmacy program, I worked on how the bacteria communicate with each other and how this might change their virulence. During this time, I got even more passionate and excited about the immune-system and about microbial-host immune system interaction in general.

Motivated by the desire to learn more about the immune system and to study it further, I joined the Master-program, Medical Life Sciences, in Kiel, Germany, where I studied inflammation and inflammatory diseases. During this time, I got exposed to even more exciting facets of the immune-system which got me even more excited about it. It was also during this time, where I got to enhance my bioinformatics and programming skills further, it was also where I fall in love with machine learning and, especially, deep learning. Deep-learning is one of the most-excited fields, it has the potential to change the quality of life for thousands of people for best. It is an extremely powerful technology when it comes to analyzing big datasets to identify patterns that would really difficult to identify otherwise.

Currently, I am extremely excited and enthusiastic about the potential for applying deep-learning to analyze the transcriptomic and peptidomics of Human-leukocyte antigen class II, which is an enigmatic protein that lies at the interface between microbial and host-immune system. It is also a protein that has been associated with a wide array of infectious, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases.  I could not have imagined something more interesting and excited to work on it!!!