I'm a scientist, basketball player and guitar fanatic
I studied biology at the University of Antwerp
In January 2018, I started my scientific journey as a PhD student supported by a personal FWO-SB grant (FWO = Research Foundation Flanders). During this joint project with the University of Antwerp (Supervision: Kris Laukens, Pieter Meysman) and the Institute of Tropical Medicine Antwerp (Supervision: Stijn Deborggraeve, Sandra van Puyvelde and Jan Jacobs), I studied the bacterium Salmonella Concord (or Salmonella enterica subspecies enterica serovar Concord if you're a scientist and reading this). I cultured a lot of these bacteria, performed short-read sequencing (Illumina), long-read sequencing (PacBio and Nanopore) and antimicrobial susceptibility testing (disk diffusion and Sensititre), and developed a lot of expertise in bacterial genomics and building bioinformatics pipelines.
In February 2022 I started working as a researcher on a two-year project on Nanopore sequencing in the Adrem Data Lab.
I played in several basketball teams over the past 14 years, including Oxaco Boechout, Antwerp Giants and Mercurius Berchem. As a result, I understand the importance of teamwork and a positive group spirit. When I'm not playing basketball, you will find me playing the acoustic guitar (Blues, Country, Bluegrass and other styles).