Contact information

Yeah... no. I used to put my professional address here, but come on, it's 2020. But here's some electronic contacts, the deobfuscation of which should not pose any major problems to you, unless you're a below-average quality bot:

for science stuff: science@firstname-removethis@#$@SGbutnotthedashLastname.com
for private messages: firstname_removethis@@#$@#$GERTbutnottheunderscoreLastname@gmx.de (yes, GMX still exists)
for work stuff: firstname.removeThiSTYWERT@#$butnotthedotLastname@tweag.io
web page: http://www.simeon-carstens.de (that's where you are)
GitHub (pretty boring so far, but you can find code for my papers there): https://github.com/simeoncarstens

Work

My academic research mostly concerns Bayesian computational methods to determine the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules. I'm interested in all aspects of this subject: developing and subsequently applying methods, the algorithms (like MCMC sampling) required to make an idea work and the biological system (at the moment, chromatin) under consideration.
All this is mostly the past, because I left science. But if you'd like to chat about any of these topics or have questions regarding my publications, shoot me a message!


Here's a little CV:

Since May 2019 I have been a Data scientist at Tweag I/O, a software innovation lab / consulting company with its headquarters in beautiful Paris, around where I also live these days. If you're looking for smart people to solve hard problems in DevOps, functional programming, data engineering or data science, we'd love to talk!

From May 2017 to September 2018, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the research group for Statistical Inverse Problems in Biophysics working with Michael Habeck.

From April 2016 through March 2017, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the Zidovska lab at New York University.

In September 2012, I moved to Paris to continue my PhD work in the Structural Bioinformatics unit at Institut Pasteur headed by Michael Nilges, where I was working on the Bayesian determination of chromatin structures from Hi-C data.

In December 2011, I started my PhD work at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology under the supervision of Michael Habeck. I did some preliminary work next door at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems.


In another previous life, I studied physics in Tübingen and did my diploma thesis in the Computational Physics group of Willy Kley on molecular dynamics simulations of protoplanetary dust agglomerates.

Publications

Besides work

Nobody really wants to know that in detail, but for the record: I love climbing, bouldering, mountaineering, skiing, hiking etc. in beautiful places all over Europe. I also like to learn interesting mathematical things which somehow have a connection to physics or my work. Plus, I'm stepping on other people's feet while trying to dance Argentinian tango.

I love music a lot, both listening to it (always open for suggestions!) and actually making music by improvising on the piano. At least I'm trying to.