Prof. Dr. Matthias Rarey
Head of Research Group Computational Molecular Design
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Prof. Dr. Matthias Rarey heads the Center for Bioinformatics at the University of Hamburg, Germany.
He is a computer scientist (M.Sc. Paderborn, 1992, Ph.D. Bonn, 1996) with a focus on Bio- and Chem-informatics. Until July 2002, he was group leader for Cheminformatics at the Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing (SCAI, former part of GMD). In 1997 and 2000, Prof. Rarey performed research in the cheminformatics departments of SmithKline Beecham (King of Prussia, PA) and Roche Bioscience (Palo Alto, CA). Prof. Rarey is a co-founder of the cheminformatics company BioSolveIT GmbH located in Sankt Augustin. Since 2002, he heads the Center for Bioinformatics at the Universität Hamburg. His research group for Computational Molecular Design focuses on the development of new algorithms for problems occurring in molecular design, innovative approaches to cheminformatics and new molecular visualization techniques. Since 1993, Prof. Rarey has been developing innovative software tools for structure- and ligand-based molecular design, several of which have gained international recognition, e.g. FlexX, Features Trees, PoseView, SMARTSeditor, Mona, ProToss and HYDE. With novel tools like SpaceLight, SpaceMACS, and FastGrow, Prof. Rarey and his group laid the foundation for efficient cheminformatics in chemical fragment spaces. For the first time, standard cheminformatics tasks like similarity searching and maximum-common-substructure search were enabled in huge make-on-demand catalogs like Enamine's REAL space and others.
From 2014- 2023, Prof. Rarey was an Associate Editor of the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling of the American Chemical Society. Furthermore, he is a member in the scientific committees of Wire Computational Molecular Science and the Journal of Molecular Graphics and Modelling as well as several national and international conferences program committees. In Hamburg, he is one of the spokespersons of the Helmholtz data sciene graduate school DASHH jointly operated by DESY, UHH and TUHH together with six additional partner institutes. He heads the recently founded Center for Data and Computing in Natural Science (CDCS) in Hamburg. As member of the German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure de.NBI he represents German activities related to 3D bioinformatics in the ELIXIR 3D-Bioinfo interest group. Since 2021, he is a member of the scientific advisory board of the Molecular and Cellular Structure division of the European Bioinformatics Institute.
Together with his colleagues, Prof. Rarey established the study programs M.Sc. Bioinformatik and B.Sc. Computing in Science and is a member of their examinations boards as well as the responsible for the study program M.Sc. Bioinformatik. Prof. Rarey is a member of the faculty council of the Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Natural Sciences, he heads the PhD committee of the Faculty of Informatics. He war a liaison professor for the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes from 2011 - 2023.