Whether hiking or rock climbing, Jakob loves being out in nature. Every summer you’ll find him in the mountains working as a holiday camp counselor for disadvantaged teens. His other passion: making science accessible and participatory for all members of society. Towards that aim, he co-founded two associations, including the DIY community biolab, [kat]alab, where he developed the educational curriculum, managed his team and promoted growth of the group within the local Viennese community, as well as Bioversum Nature-Inspired Systems, a biomimicry initiative. After receiving his Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Lugwig-Maximilians University in Munich, Jakob moved to Vienna to attend the Technical University where he earned his Masters in Biomedical Engineering, focusing on mathematical and computational biology. During this time, he worked for Ottobock HealthCare, developing a machine learning system for terrain recognition in knee prosthesis using matlab, Python and scikit-learn. Jakob joined contextflow in spring 2019 as an Application & Data Engineer, took a break to climb some pretty impressive mountains, and then returned to us as an Integration & Interfacing Specialist.

Favorite meal: Bún Chay

Recommended reading: The River of Consciousness by Oliver Sacks

People would be surprised to learn…that I actually like romantic movies, haha!

If I wasn’t working as an Integration & Interfacing Specialist, I would be…advocating making science accessible for everyone in society. I’d join an initiative (or start one!) that enables civic participation and foster research carried out by enthusiasts, independently from universities and large corporations.

Most rewarding part of my job: The process of reading more and more about a difficult topic until finally it becomes clear, and a simple solution is obvious. Doesn’t happen often like that, so I guess finding that one bug that took hours to find is the greatest pain relief.