Alexander Botzki at the Flemish Institute of Biotechnology, Belgium has with his group the mission of providing technology training in domains of VIB Technologies, Bioinformatics & AI, Software Development, and Research Data Management. Between 2014 and 2022, he was head of the VIB Bioinformatics Core. From September 2009 to July 2014, he was responsible for the roll-out of E-Notebook (electronic lab notebook) to VIB's researchers within 75 research groups.

Before joining VIB, Alexander worked on various computational biology projects for Algonomics (bought by Lonza, 2008-2009) and DevGen (now Syngenta, from 2006-2008). During Alexander's PostDoc at Sanofi Aventis in Strasbourg, he executed various virtual screening campaigns on the compound selection of the merged enterprise. He received his doctoral degree with the group of Prof. Dr. Armin Buschauer (University of Regensburg, Germany) on 'Structure-based design of hyaluronidase inhibitors'.

Professor of Big Data Science.
Specialties: algorithms, data structures, web development, data visualization, computational biology, bioinformatics, computational metaproteomics

Nicolas Vannieuwkerke is a bioinformatician at CMGG (UZ Ghent) who mainly focuses on developing and maintaining Nextflow pipelines for the diagnostic NGS analyses. He is a very active member of the Nextflow community as a Nextflow ambassador and is part of the nf-core core team. Nf-core is the largest Nextflow community that creates and maintains a number of best-practice pipelines and developer resources.

Edoardo Giuili is a PhD researcher in the TOBI lab (VIB-UGent), where he explores innovative methods to study cancer and its resistance to treatment. He is part of the EpiGuide project, developing a minimally invasive blood test to monitor cancer patients over time. His research focuses on analyzing bulk and single-cell epigenomic data from tumor samples, as well as benchmarking tools to estimate tumor fraction in plasma cell-free DNA methylation samples.

Originally from Italy, Edoardo earned his bachelor’s degree in Biology from the University of Roma Tre in 2020 and his master’s degree in Bioinformatics from the University of Bologna in 2022. During his master’s thesis at the OncoRNAlab (UGent), he investigated RNA transcriptomes of lymphoma patients. He then spent a year at IBsquare in Brussels (ULB/VUB) studying DNA methylation profiles in patients with neurodevelopmental disorders before joining Prof. De Preter’s group in 2023.

Rafael Andrade Buono is a data steward at VIB and ELIXIR Belgium, working on the development of a (meta)data management platform and on the collection and dissemination of research data management best practices.