Enes Senel.

About

Hi, I'm Enes.

I'm a computer scientist who ended up in biology, and I've stayed because the problems keep getting more interesting. These days I'm a Senior Scientist at Johnson & Johnson, leading single-cell work in oncology and immunology.

I grew up in Turkey and studied computer science in Istanbul. My first real research job was in a robotics lab, writing the computer-vision code that let a robot follow an ultrasound image during a biopsy. Seeing my code move something physical got me hooked on research.

For my master's I moved to Munich. On the side I worked on deep learning for pharmaceutical quality control and on proteomics data in a neuroscience lab. That was the point where biology stopped being a side interest.

Then came Berlin and a PhD at the Max Delbrück Center on spatial transcriptomics, which is about working out where cells sit in a tissue and what they're doing. I built Optocoder and helped build novoSpaRc.

At J&J I now spend about as much time talking with lab, clinical, and manufacturing colleagues as I do writing code, and I enjoy that more than I expected. I mentor junior scientists and decide how we analyse our data.

Education

Three chapters
  1. 2019 — 2026 (exp.)

    Ph.D. in Computational Biology

    Humboldt University of Berlin · Max Delbrück Center

    Thesis: Computational modelling and machine learning for spatial transcriptomics and cell–cell interactions. Focus: ML, bioinformatics, transcriptomics.

  2. 2016 — 2019

    M.Sc. in Computer Science

    Technical University of Munich

    Thesis: Analysis of activity-dependent proteomic changes associated with homeostatic scaling. DAAD MSc Scholarship. Focus: ML, AI, bioinformatics.

  3. 2012 — 2016

    B.Sc. in Computer Science

    Ozyegin University, Istanbul

    Thesis: A standalone application for a 2D ultrasound-guided medical robotic system. Focus: software development, medical robotics, computer vision.

Service

Community

2022 — 2023

Helmholtz Juniors — Member

Elected representative for ~8,000 PhD students across the Helmholtz Association. Contributed to the 2021 PhD survey analysis and per-center reports.

2020 — 2023

MDC PhD Representatives — Awareness team

Worked on improving contracts, salaries, and working conditions for doctoral students at the Max Delbrück Center.