Maren Hackenberg

Hi, thanks for stopping by!

I’m Maren, a postdoctoral researcher in computational biology at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in the Huber group.

My current work is supported by an EIPOD-LinC Postdoctoral Fellowship and focuses on landmark-informed modelling for spatial omics. I aim to bring together foundation models, spatial statistics, and scientific computing, to build quantitative models of micro-anatomy for interpretable spatial omics analysis.

During my PhD, I worked on developing methods for structured representation learning and dynamic modelling across single-cell omics and clinical registries. While these areas may seem rather diverse, I became interested in the structural challenges they share. My PhD thesis compiles a few, and some ideas on how to address them. I’m a Julia fangirl and I got excited about the language when I used differentiable programming to combine knowledge-driven modeling from mathematics and statistics with data-driven modeling approaches from machine learning.

I particularly enjoy the interdisciplinary nature of my work, and I like teaching, mentoring, and building dialogue across disciplines and career stages.

Outside research, I spend much of my time with my family. When there is time around that, you might find me rehearsing with my chamber choir or listening to choral music, hiking in the mountains, or returning to the beauty of classical languages and literature (for example the song of Calliope, Metamorphoses V.332-571).