Uwe Ohler is an Associate Professor in Biostatistics & Bioinformatics with a secondary appointment at the Department of Computer Science. He studied computer science with a minor in biology at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany, graduating in 1996. During a student research project involving computational DNA sequence analyis, he became fascinated with computational biology.

In 1998, he started his PhD research at the Chair for Pattern Recognition (Professor Heinrich Niemann) at the same university. He was a Boehringer Ingelheim pre-doctoral fellow from 1998-2001 and a visiting researcher with the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project (Professor Gerald Rubin). He obtained his PhD with distinction in 2002 for the McPromoter system for computational identification of promoters in eukaryotic genomes.

Before joining the faculty of the IGSP, Uwe worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Biology (Professor Chris Burge) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was also a member of the cross-departmental Computational and Systems Biology Initiative. Uwe' s focus in computational biology has so far been on DNA sequence analysis, in particular on models for gene finding and gene regulation. Most recently, his research has lead to the discovery of new core promoter sequence elements in Drosophila, microRNA genes in C. elegans, and alternative splice forms of mammalian genes.