Niko Sonnenschein
Associate Principal Scientist - Digital Product Developer
Swansea, Wales, United Kingdom
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolNiko Sonnenschein is an Associate Principal Scientist and digital product developer with 17 years of experience at the intersection of biotechnology and software engineering, now based in Swansea, Wales. He has led product and engineering efforts across industry and academia, from securing €7.6M in Horizon 2020 funding and building cloud-native platforms at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability to shaping GenAI-enabled biological search and DNA design products at Ginkgo Bioworks. Niko combines deep domain expertise in metabolic modeling and experimental automation with hands-on engineering—contributing backend fixes and solver integrations to the widely used COBRApy metabolic modeling library. He excels at translating complex life-science R&D workflows into scalable, containerized services and reproducible developer practices (CI/CD, monitoring, DevOps). As an educator and team builder he has established bio-data science curricula and led multidisciplinary teams to operationalize ML-driven experimental design. Colleagues rely on him for turning academic methods into production-ready products that accelerate biotech R&D and commercialization.
17 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Technischen Universität Darmstadt
German, English, Greek, Danish
Github Skills (10)
bioinformatics10
sbml10
computational-biology10
python10
cobra10
modeling10
metabolic-models10
flux9
fluxor9
pytest7
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
opencobra/cobrapy
May 2014 - Feb 2017
COBRApy is a package for constraint-based modeling of metabolic networks.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:12 commits, 15 PRs, 10 pushes in 2 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Niko primarily contributed to improving the codebase's compatibility and functionality within the COBRApy library. They fixed Python 3-specific issues related to string encoding and exception handling, specifically within the SBML file import functionality. Further contributions involved adding an optlang solver interface to the model class, enabling direct solver updates. Moreover, they refined the documentation, demonstrating a focus on improving the library's usability and maintainability.
pythonsystems-biologysimulationsbml-simulationbioinformatics
phantomas1234/fbaproject
Feb 2009 - Oct 2016
Contributions:41 commits, 4 pushes in 7 years 9 months
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