DKTK School of Oncology Tech Talk
with Philipp Putze
PhD candidate at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ)
Wednesday 23.09.26 | 16:00 - 17:00 via Zoom
Join our second DKTK School of Oncology Tech Talk in 2026 with Philipp Putze who will talk about "From Noise to Insight: A Computational Journey Through Single-Cell Biology". After the presentation there will be ample opportunity to ask questions to the speaker and to engage in a lively discussion.
Single-cell and spatial transcriptomics have transformed our ability to study biology, scaling from experiments with hundreds of cells to atlases containing millions. Yet this explosion in data has brought equally significant computational challenges, including technical noise, batch effects, and the integration of increasingly complex modalities. In this talk, I will trace the evolution of computational methods that have enabled this progress; from linear approaches such as PCA, which first helped to reveal cellular diversity, to deep generative models that disentangle biological signal from technical variation while enabling the prediction of rich molecular measurements from more abundant and cost-effective assays. Finally, I will discuss the emergence of single-cell foundation models, which move beyond reconstructing noisy observations to learning transferable representations of biology itself, allowing new datasets to be interpreted in the context of millions of previously measured cells and opening new opportunities for cross-dataset integration, multimodal patient stratification, and biological discovery.
SPEAKER:
Philipp Putze
Philipp Putze is a PhD candidate at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), where he develops deep learning methods for single-cell and spatial transcriptomics. His research combines machine learning with cancer biology to study tumor ecosystems and develop computational tools that enable biological discovery at atlas scale. His work spans multimodal transcriptional analysis, generative modeling, and the development of foundation models for single-cell biology. Before joining TUM, he completed his Master’s degree in Multidisciplinary Research in Experimental Sciences through a joint project at the Insitute for Research in Biomedicine Barcelona (IRB) and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), where he investigated the early evolution of pancreatic cancer using single-cell transcriptomics.
VENUE:
The Talk will take place online via Zoom.
Registered participants will receive the login information.
ORGANIZER & HOST:
DKTK School of Oncology for DKFZ
