Welcome to the home page of Andreas Krause

Who I am
Well, who am I? That is a topic that many philosophers struggled with.
What do you want to know?
Maybe a picture will do it? If so, take a look:

In brief, I am male (see the facial hair), and my age is, erm, above the critical mark of 40. Both facts were probably already revealed by the photo and I better focus on other things.

Professional interests My professional interests are, generally speaking, modeling and simulation in its many flavors (describing data by mathematical computer models and simulating scenarios of interest.

My rent is paid by developing and applying such models in drug development, basically modeling what drugs do in and to patients, and simulating from the statistical model what the outcome might be if we did this and that (for example, give higher or lower doses, treat patients longer, treat only severly ill patients, different genders and races, and so on). In other words, you might call it treatment effect determination and optimization.

Most of my work is done with software tools like S-Plus and R, but I have had exposure to a lot of other languages (including nonmem, Berkeley Madonna, recently Monolix, SAS and friends, winbugs, Unix shell scripting, good old Turbo Pascal, C, HTML, Java, and the like).

Present and former workplaces After my studies in plain statistics (Dortmund, 1990) I did my PhD on Markov Chain Monte Carlo Methods, in particular the Gibbs sampler in Tobit models, applying it to modeling of plant growth (Basel, 1994). I started in the pharmaceutical industry and I stayed there ever since. Work places I have seen include Ciba-Geigy (extinct- not my fault), GeneData, Novartis Pharma, Pharsight Consulting, and I am now at Actelion, a Biotech company just outside Basel in Switzerland.
Documents I have published a couple of articles and books. My area of interest, modeling and simulation, has a strong computing aspect, and besides the math and science behind it, I keep maintaining interest in the communication of results by means of graphics.

I guess most people might know me for books on S-Plus and R, the system that happens to be my computing environment of choice.
In case you are interested, here are some links:
The Basics of S-Plus, Statistical Applications in the Pharmaceutical Industry, Einführung in S und S-Plus.

Private Well, I live in Switzerland, close to Basel. It has been almost 20 years since I moved out here from Germany, my native country. For a break, I lived for a year in Chatham, New Jersey (USA) for the year 2003.

Despite a good workload and well justified requests to play in the sandbox, I keep running - literally. I like running on the treadmill, but a couple of times per year I run in public runs, either 10 km (Birslauf) or half marathons (Drei-Laender-Lauf and Basel Marathon).
You have a good chance of outrunning me if you can run at an average well below 5 minutes per kilometer or 8 minutes per mile.

On the Lighter Side I spent a year living in New Jersey. If you are interested in seeing some of the United States with European eyes, here is a compilation of "greatest hits":
Stories from a great country.

If you work in the pharmaceutical industry, I am sure you will enjoy the philosophy of Guernsey McPearson in
The Devil's Drug Development Dictionaries.

 
Getting in touch with me Due to all the spam email in this world, I see no way around obfuscating my email addresses a little to make them illegible to automated address harvesters.
What you need to do is this: put andreas in front of elmo.ch and insert an "at" in between.