Frederik Coppens

As a bioscience engineer, I started a PhD studying leaf development in Arabidopsis thaliana in the group of Gerrit Beemster at the VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology. During my PhD I gradually shifted from wetlab to bioinformatics. I mostly worked with expression data: from qPCR, over microarrays to RNA sequencing. As a post-doc in the group of Dirk Inzé, I focussed on bioinformatics and implemented an RNA-seq workflow in our center. I’m IT manager and Project Leader of the Applied Bioinformatics and Biostatistics (ABB) group at the VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology. The mission of the ABB group is to enable (wetlab) scientist to perform bioinformatics and biostatistical analyses. My team provides consultancy to optimise the setup of the experiment, generation of data and analysis for biostatistics and bioinformatics in general. We provide solutions for divers NGS applications through implementation of standard workflows in Galaxy (www.galaxyproject.org) or through custom data analysis. Through the combination with my function as IT manager, I ensure our IT infrastructure is optimised to facilitate data analysis for our scientists to address their research questions. I manage a team of six people that handles the IT helpdesk, custom applications and IT infrastructure. We host a compute cluster, private cloud and storage array tailored to the needs of our research center. I'm Head of Node for ELIXIR Belgium. ELIXIR unites Europe’s leading life science organisations in managing and safeguarding the increasing volume of data being generated by publicly funded research. It coordinates, integrates and sustains bioinformatics resources across its member states and enables users in academia and industry to access services that are vital for their research. Within ELIXIR Europe I’m involved in the Tools and Interoperability Platforms, the Plant Community and I have co-founded and co-chair of the Galaxy Community. In ELIXIR Belgium we focus on providing services in data management and analysis, focussing on practical and user-friendly solutions for researchers. We host usegalaxy.be and are developing data management solutions based on FAIRDOM.