Knut Reinert (born 19 January 1968) is a German computer scientist and bioinformatician who has worked in computational biology and algorithm development.https://research.com/u/knut-reinert, accessed 09.04.2025https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3078-8129, accessed 09.04.2025 He is currently a full professor at the Institute of Computer Science at Free University of Berlin, where he leads the Algorithmic Bioinformatics research group.https://www.mi.fu-berlin.de/en/inf/groups/abi/members/Professors/reinert.html, accessed 08.04.2025
Early life and education
Reinert completed his undergraduate studies in Computer Science at the University of the Saarland in 1994. He then pursued his doctoral studies at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken, earning his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1999 under the supervision of Kurt Mehlhorn and Hans-Peter Lenhof.Vita at the Max Planck Institute for molecular genetics, accessed 19.07.2024https://zbi-www.bioinf.uni-sb.de/en/lenhof-home/lenhof-people/, accessed 09.04.2025 His doctoral thesis, titled "A Polyhedral Approach to Sequence Alignment Problems", focused on solving NP-hard sequence alignment problems for Proteins and RNA using methods from combinatorial optimization.K. Reinert, A polyhedral approach to sequence alignment problems. (1999). DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.22028/D291-25731
Academic career
After completing his Ph.D., Reinert worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Celera Genomics (Rockville, USA) from 1999 to 2002.https://idw-online.de/de/news56671, accessed 09.04.29025 During this time, he worked in the Informatics Research group under the guidance of Gene Myershttps://www.nvidia.com/content/cuda/spotlights/knut-reinert-fuberlin.html, accessed 09.04.2025 on the first whole genome shotgun assemblies of Drosophila melanogasterMark D. Adams et al., The Genome Sequence of Drosophila melanogaster. Science287, 2185-2195(2000). DOI:10.1126/science.287.5461.2185 and Human.J. Craig Venter et al., The Sequence of the Human Genome. Science291, 1304-1351(2001). DOI:10.1126/science.1058040 Later he also contributed on algorithms for the analysis of mass spectrometry analysis.Röst, H., Sachsenberg, T., Aiche, S. et al. OpenMS: a flexible open-source software platform for mass spectrometry data analysis. Nat Methods 13, 741–748 (2016). DOI:https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.3959
In 2002, Reinert joined Free University of Berlin as a professor in the Institute of Computer Science. He established the Algorithmic Bioinformatics research group, which has since become a leading center for bioinformatics research in Germany. Since 2015, his group is partner in the Center for Integrative Bioinformatics within the German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure project.https://www.denbi.de/network/center-for-integrative-bioinformatics-cibi, accessed 09.04.2025
Research
Reinert's research lies at the intersection of computer science and biology. His work spans several key areas, including algorithms for sequence analysis, processing large-scale sequencing data, and mass spectrometry data analysis. Focusing on developing efficient algorithms and data structures for analysing large-scale biological data, he started the development of SeqAn,Döring, A., Weese, D., Rausch, T. et al. SeqAn An efficient, generic C++ library for sequence analysis. BMC Bioinformatics 9, 11 (2008). DOI:https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-9-11 an open-source C++ software library and co-started the OpenMS project together with Oliver Kohlbacher.
Awards and recognition
Knut Reinert was appointed a Max-Planck fellow in 2014Press release Nr. 112/2014 of Free University of Berlin, accessed 19.07.2024 and was accepted as a member of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation.
References
External links
Knut Reinert's profile at Freie Universität Berlin List of Knut Reinert's publications at Google Scholar Algorithmic Bioinformatics research group website SeqAn library website OpenMS framework website