Christian Madsen is currently doing a PhD in computational biology, currently with a lot of emphasis on topology, which is a new challenge, as he has a bioengineering background, and not a mathematicians education.

It has been an applied study of topology, with topological data analysis of protein chains and chromatin structures.

He has found it exciting to make observations across all sequenced proteins from this, regarding stability at different temperatures, folding domains, and how eukaryotic proteins appear to have higher topological complexity. This is not completely unexpected, but still important to see reflected in a topological analysis.

Another interesting study, which was unexpected, was his dive into meiosis. With a need to understand meiosis better to be able to say new things regarding chromatin structure during meiosis, which led to some new insights into connections between chromatin axis loop densities vs. double stranded breaks and crossovers.