Editor’s Note: Otto left the group in 2024. For the latest information, please refer to his LinkedIn profile.

Originally coming from Lingen (Ems) in Lower Saxony, Otto studied Chemistry at the Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena. He finished his bachelor’s degree in 2018 with a focus on Analytical Chemistry. For his bachelor’s thesis, he worked in the field of mass spectrometry-based comparative metabolomics. He joined the group of Christoph Steinbeck as a student and finished his master’s degree in 2020. He is currently continuing his work on chemical data extraction in the group as a PhD student.

His research focuses on the automated extraction of structured data from scientific publications. He is interested in the application of Natural Language Processing, Optical Character Recognition and Optical Chemical Structure Recognition in order to extract specific chemical information from text and images with the goal of making it publicly available in open databases.

Apart from science, Otto likes playing piano and going for long runs in the forest. He is passionate about cooking (and eating good food, of course) as well as a good cup of coffee. He speaks German, English and French and is always happy about the opportunity to discover new places.