Willi Gottstein

Background

About Willi Gottstein

Experienced scientific project and team lead working on iterative product development by combining lab automation and machine learning into autonomous, closed-loop experimentation platforms (aka "self-driving laboratories"). I lead multidisciplinary, focused and dedicated teams that tackle challenging scientific and business relevant customer-centric use cases. Currently, I work at the Acceleration Consortium to de-risk self-driving labs for industry applications. In my previous role at dsm-firmenich, I led a project on self-driving laboratories for food applications leading to a 5x-20x speed up of the RD related product development activities. The work included building the AI/ML framework for iterative product development, setting up the cloud-based data architecture as well as the development of down-scaled high-throughput robotic assays required for data generation. I thereby piloted a medium-sized team that included lab automation experts, technicians, data scientists, DevOps, MLOps and data engineers. The project has already delivered a commercial product, Delvo®ONE: and it has become the new way of working at the company. Furthermore, I also still enjoy hands-on work which mainly involves data analytics using Machine Learning-omics analysis, the reconstruction, simulation and visualization of genome-scale metabolic models as well as building/maintaining computational infrastructure required for Automated Strain Engineering (ASE) and High-throughput Screening. I mainly use Python and Java, build REST APIs and Front-ends so that also people with little or no programming experience can access analysis tools. In addition to the scientific work, I orchestrated the piloting and roll-out of software tools across R&D sites with 100+ users, such as LabTwin which led to a significant improvement of lab experiment documentation both regarding quality and speed; see the white paper here: • lab automation / robotics /#selfdrivinglabs • advanced analytics / machine learning • software and web development • biotechnology and strain/metabolic engineering • microbial communities • regulation and organization of metabolism • constraint-based stoichiometric and kinetic modeling You can find me on medium, e.g: https://willigottstein.medium.com/you-are-applying-design-build-test-learn-cycles-57db3604d579