2022 to 2023 · Germany

Boehringer Ingelheim & E.ON SE.

M.Sc. Data Analytics and Decision Science, RWTH Aachen · 2021–2023Data Science Intern & Master Thesis (BI)Business Analytics, Working Student (E.ON)

Core responsibility

Bring data science and analytics into two high-stakes, regulated industries, pharma and energy, where interpretability and trust decide whether anything gets adopted.

Explainable AIHealthcare AIDeep LearningBusiness AnalyticsRegulated Industries
  • After four years of running a business on self-taught analytics, I wanted the formal foundation: a Master's in Data Analytics and Decision Science at RWTH Aachen. Alongside it, I took a working-student role at E.ON and an internship plus thesis at Boehringer Ingelheim, to see how data science works inside large German companies.
  • At Boehringer, I built a SHAP-based interpretability framework and fine-tuned ResNet50 models for a thesis detecting diabetic retinopathy stages, checking the explanations against clinically annotated lesions.
  • At E.ON, I worked in business analytics on sales and financial reporting, comparing actuals against forecasts across products and countries, and building the KPIs that reporting ran on.
  • Working across pharma and energy showed me what enterprise data work really is: less about the model, more about whether the business can act on it.

Major projects

01

Explainable AI for Diabetic Retinopathy Detection (Boehringer Ingelheim)

Explainable AIDeep LearningResNet50SHAP / DeepSHAPClinical Validation
Challenge

Diabetic retinopathy screening needs specialists the world doesn't have enough of. Deep learning can classify retinal images at scale, but in a clinical setting a black-box prediction is unusable: a model nobody can interpret is a model nobody will use.

What I did

Built a SHAP-based interpretability framework for clinical decision support models across linear, tree-based and deep architectures, comparing XAI methods against established feature selection approaches for clinical trials and drug development. My master thesis took it further: fine-tuned deep learning models, including ResNet50, detecting diabetic retinopathy stages from retinal fundus images, with local colour enhancement and strategic data balancing driving the performance gains. The core of the work was trust: DeepSHAP explanations validated against clinically annotated lesions, so the model's attention could be checked against what ophthalmologists actually look for.

02

Business Analytics at Utility Scale (E.ON)

Business AnalyticsFinancial ReportingSales ReportingKPI Design
Challenge

Sales and financial performance across multiple products and countries, with data from 5+ customer solutions serving millions of users, and business decisions waiting on reporting that was slow to produce.

What I did

Worked on sales and financial reporting across the customer solutions: managing data acquisition, streamlining the analytics pipeline, and publishing performance reports that compared actuals against forecasts across products and countries. Designed new KPIs that fed directly into business decisions.

Skills applied

Explainable AIHealthcare AIDeep LearningBusiness AnalyticsRegulated Industries

Key learnings

The Master's turned what I had taught myself as a founder into method: statistics I could defend, models I could explain, and decision science I could apply to a real P&L. These roles taught me what adoption really depends on. A model earns its place when a clinician can check its reasoning, and a report earns its place when a controller can trace the numbers behind it. Whether the audience is medical or financial, the work is only finished when the person accountable for the decision can trust it.

What this role proves

That my AI work has roots in environments where mistakes have real consequences, that the analytics I built as a founder was formalised here, and that I learned explainability and governance not as compliance checkboxes, but as what makes AI usable at all.