Science
In August 2007 I joined the Center for Molecular Neurology in the Neurodegenerative Brain Diseases group of professor dr. Christine van Broeckhoven. For 5 years I have been gaining expertise in functional dementia research.
In the autumn of 2011 a switch was made to join the GSF, now known as Neuromics Support Facility which in that time focused mainly on offering a quick, reliable and high throughput service on the Sanger Sequencing platforms.
After 2 years I became involved in the next generation sequencing on the Illumina platforms (MiSeq and NextSeq500) and since then building up my expertise in a wide range of NGS experiments (WES, RNA-seq, MASTR), including all necessary QC and sample preparation steps in the full NGS pipeline. This QC pipeline includes a wide array of techniques like Qubit 3.0 (Invitrogen), Dropsense16 (Trinean) and Fragment Analyzer (Agilent).
From 2017 on we expanded our NGS portofolio, acquiring both MinION and later PromethION instruments from Oxford Nanopore Technologies and since then vastly increasing our knowledge and expertise on these platforms. With these new long read technologies we can also perform direct whole genome sequencing, direct RNA sequencing and in the near future targeted sequencing.
I am also involved in testing and optimizing new technologies and products and solutions with third parties as we keep searching for novel technologies and ways to further improve our existing protocols and pipelines.