Sarah Behrens, PhD

• Research interests:
  
  
  • Probabilistic models of DNA sequence evolution
  • Evolution of transcriptional gene regulation
  • ChIP-seq data analysis
  • Markov models
  • Word statistics and motif enrichment analysis



• Short Curriculum Vitae:
  
  
  • since Jul. 2010: Post Doc at the Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity in the Evolutionary Bioinformatics group of Erich Bornberg-Bauer; Scientific coordinator of the DFG-SPP "Host Parasite Coevolution"
    
  • Oct. 2008-Jun. 2010: Post Doc at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, Department of Computational Molecular Biology in the group of Martin Vingron
    
  • Jul. 2008: PhD degree (Dr. rer. nat.) at the Faculty for Mathematics and Computer Science at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany
    topic of the thesis: Identification of over- and underrepresented words in DNA sequences and a probabilistic analysis of the Longest Common Subsequence of two DNA sequences using large deviations theory (moderate deviations)
  • Mar. 2006 - Sep. 2008: Research/Teaching Assistant and PhD studies in the group of Matthias Löwe at the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in Münster
  • Dez. 2005: Diploma in Mathematics (minor subject: biology) at the Faculty for Mathematics in Münster
    
    topic of the thesis: Alignments of DNA and protein sequences; characterization of the length and composition of high scoring sequence pairs
  • 2005: Internship at the Center of Advanced European Studies and Research (Bonn) in the group "Functional Peptides"
  • 2002-2005: Student Assistant at the Faculty for Mathematics in Münster
    
  • 2000-2005: Studies of Mathematics (and Biology) in Münster
    
  • 2000: Abitur at the Städtisches Gymnasium Kamen, Germany



• Publications and theses:
  
  
  • Behrens, S., Vingron, M.: Studying the evolution of promoters: a waiting time problem, accepted by J. Comput. Biol.
  • Behrens, S., Löwe, M.: Moderate deviations for word counts in biological sequences, Journal of Applied Probability, Vol. 46, No. 4, 1020-1037, 2009. (article)
  • Behrens, S., Moderate und große Abweichungen zur statistischen Analyse biologischer Sequenzen, PhD thesis, 2008. (German version)
  • Behrens, S., Grenzwertsätze für empirische Funktionen von Partialsummen zur Untersuchung von DNA- und Proteinsequenzen, Diploma thesis, 2005. (German version)



• Teaching:
  
  
  • Seminar on Combinatorics and Probability Theory (University of Münster, SS 08)
  • Seminar on Mathematical Biology (University of Münster, WS 07/08)
  • Probability Theory 1+2 (University of Münster, SS 06 and WS 06/07)