Casper de Visser

After months of study at home (due to Covid-19) and a long summer break I was very happy to start working at the Centre for Molecular and Biomolecular Informatics (CMBI) in Nijmegen as Scientific Programmer. My activities here are part of the X-omics initiative. 

I followed the master program Molecular Genetics & Biotechnology at the Leiden University. During this master I developed an interest for computational biology and therefore I chose to do research internships that gave me the opportunity to get hands-on experience with bioinformatics. My first internship was at the Institute of Biology Leiden (IBL), where I combined both wet- and dry lab research to study a Biosynthetic Gene Cluster in Streptomyces, under supervision of Gilles van Wezel. My second internship was at the Neurogenetics group of the UMC Utrecht, under supervision of Jan Veldink. Here, I studied (expanded) short tandem repeats that can cause ALS. Specifically, I developed a tool to study the presence of interrupting DNA motifs in these repetitive DNA elements.

For X-omics, I am currently involved in the ACTION demonstrator project and in close collaboration with Anna Niehues I am also working on the Digital Research Environment (DRE). All in all, I am very pleased to be part of X-omics, where I think I can both prove and develop my skills/knowledge in the different -omics types or research.