Dr. Steinegger is an Assistant Professor in the biology department at the Seoul National University. He studied bioinformatics and computer science at the Technical University Munich and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. During this time, he worked as a research assistant of Professor Burkhard Rost, focusing on the development of methods for predicting protein mutation effects.

He received his Ph.D. from the Technical University Munich in collaboration with Dr. Johannes Söding at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry for his work on computational methods to assemble, cluster and annotate metagenomic sequencing data. As a Postdoc in the group of Professor Steven L. Salzberg at the CCB at Johns Hopkins University, he developed methods for the identification of pathogenic agents in infectious diseases, the detection of assembly contamination in public datasets and the annotation of missing exons in the human proteome.

Dr. Steinegger is an expert on large scale sequence data analysis and method development and an advocate for open science and open source.