How to Grow a Computational Biology Lab

Start of the lab: 2007 Size of the lab: 16 Research field: Computational biology I began building my lab after having been selected to run an independent junior research group by the Max Planck Society at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken in 2007. At a meeting at Rutgers University that summer, I convinced a very good postdoc, Ben Adams, who was working in Japan by that time, that joining my new lab would be a great idea. We arrived in Saarbrücken at about the same time in the fall, and that’s how the lab started. In the following year, I recruited another PhD student through advertising and three by contacting colleagues. From 2009 onwards, I decided to hire on average two people per year, so that, assuming a stay of four years in the lab on average, the group would consist of 8–10 scientists at any given time, with different levels of seniority. Currently, the lab includes eight PhD students, several student programmers, interns, and nonscientific personnel, as well as two postdocs who just joined us. In 2010, we moved from Saarbrücken to Düsseldorf in Germany, as I was appointed to chair of Algorithmic Bioinformatics at Heinrich Heine University. In 2014, I accepted the position as the head of the Computational Biology of Infectious Diseases Lab at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig, Germany.