maria.sorokina@uni-jena.de

Note from the editor: Maria left the group in 2021 (LinkedIn-Profile).

Postdoctoral researcher at the Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena, Germany.

Born in Moscow, Russia, and raised in Paris, France, I am a bio- and cheminformatician.

I obtained my Master in Bioinformatics and Biostatistics at the University Paris-Sud 11 and the Ecole Polytechnique in 2012. I then joined the group of Claudine Medigue at Genoscope, CEA to pursue my doctoral studies on the elaboration of a new representation of metabolic networks for the detection of chemical transformation modules under the supervision of David Vallenet. During this time I also looked at the problem of so-called “orphan enzymes” – enzyme activities that are known to be present in living organisms but there is no protein sequence in public databases that are known to catalyze them. After the obtention of my doctoral degree in 2016, I moved to Cologne, Germany to work on the elucidation of mechanisms of enzyme backup in budding and fission yeasts at Andreas Beyer group at the CECAD.

In 2018, I joined the group of Christoph Steinbeck at the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Germany, to work on Natural Products cheminformatics.

My current projects:

I am also involved in data management within ChemBioSys CRC and the Microverse excellence cluster.

My principal scientific motivation is to bridge together the different branches of life sciences for the understanding of life as a system. Metabolism is an excellent playground for me, as its study requires knowledge and integration of data from very different areas such as genomics, (bio)chemistry, network biology, biophysics, and, of course, computer science.

Finally, in December 2021, I joined Bayer Pharmaceuticals in Berlin to work on digital transformation challenges in Research and Early Development for personalized and precision medicine.

Besides science, I am a fervent traveler, a modern art aficionado, and a space exploration dreamer.

Note from the editor: Maria left the group in 2021 (LinkedIn-Profile).