Philipp Kirchner is a bioinformatician at the Institute of Tissue Medicine and Pathology, University of Bern, Switzerland. After obtaining his Ph.D. in cell biology from the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany he went on to a post-doc in the lab of Ana-Maria Cuervo at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, U.S.A. There he became involved with computational biology investigating the genome-wide prevalence of targeting motives for chaperone mediated autophagy. Fully focussing on bioinformatics, he then joined the institute of Human Genetics at the University Hospital Erlangen, Germany as a staff scientist for the analysis of bulk and single cell RNA sequencing experiments. At the Institute of Tissue Medicine and Pathology, he applies his expertise in transcriptomics in combination with epigenomics and metabolomics to characterize the progression and heterogeneity of cancer.