About me

Expertise & Interests

• Full stack development
• Web applications built with React and Angular
• APIs written in NestJS, Python and Scala (REST, GraphQL)
• Deployment to cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP)
• Bioinformatics and data wrangling with R and Python
• Containerized data processing workflows with Snakemake and Nextflow
• Interactive apps for data visualization with Shiny

Education

• Ph.D. in Computational Biology / Molecular Medicine, 2020
  Università degli Studi di Milano (IT)
  Research carried out at the European Institute of Oncology (IEO - Istituto Europeo di Oncologia), Milan (IT)
• M.Sc. in Biotechnology - Biochemical Engineering, 2014
  Technische Universität Braunschweig (DE)
• B.Sc. in Biotechnology - Applied Cell Biology, 2012
  Technische Universität Braunschweig (DE)

Other Activities

• Scientific Organizing Committee for ENABLE Symposium (2018-2019)
• Climbing instructor at the Escaladrome boulder gym in Hannover (DE) (2016)
• Pharmaceutical Sales Representative (2015)
• Participant in iGEM competition for Synthetic Biology (2013)

Selected Publications

• Time makes histone H3 modifications drift in mouse liver
  R Hillje, et al., Aging (2022) Article
• XenoCell: classification of cellular barcodes in single cell experiments from xenograft samples
  S Cheloni, R Hillje, et al., BMC Medical Genomics (2021) Article | GitLab
• Cerebro: Interactive visualization of scRNA-seq data
  R Hillje, et al., Bioinformatics (2019) Article | GitHub (Cerebro) | GitHub (cerebroApp)
• Tightly regulated 'all-in'one' lentiviral vector for protection of human hematopoietic cells from anticancer chemotherapy
  N Lachmann, S Brennig, et al., Gene Therapy (2015) Article