About me

Welcome! I am a mathematician turned bioinformatician working on genome reconstruction and analysis for viruses and bacteria. More specifically, I develop algorithms and software for reconstruction of microbial genomes from sequencing data, and then apply these methods to characterize pathogen diversity in patient or community samples. See research, publications, software and talks for further details. You can also read in Dutch about my work on wastewater analysis at the NVMM news page, or about my work on viral genome assembly at the popular science platforms Kennislink and C2W.

After completing my MSc degree in mathematics, I started my PhD research in viral genomics at the Dutch institute for mathematics and computer science (CWI). For postdoctoral research, I spent two years in the Baym lab at Harvard Medical School to extend my expertise to bacterial genomics. In September 2021, I joined the Bioinformatics Lab at TU Delft as an assistant professor. I am a member of the European Virus Bioinformatics Center (EVBC and I am looking forward to further collaborations with theoretical as well as experimental research groups interested in microbial genomics and pathogen surveillance.

Besides research contributions, I strive for gender equality in academia: I co-organize the Future Female+ Faculty mentorship program (F+Cube), I have launched an initiative to attract more female students to computer science programs, and I participate in outreach activities in primary education to break with gender stereotypes in technology.