Rémy Bruggmann leads the Interfaculty Bioinformatics Unit (IBU) at the University of Bern, which he founded in 2011 to coordinate bioinformatics research, infrastructure, and support across multiple faculties. His work focuses on enabling researchers to extract biological insight from complex omics data, ranging from genome and transcriptome assemblies to large-scale pan-genomic and metagenomic analyses.
Together with his team, he has supported more than 800 collaborative projects spanning medicine, biology, and veterinary sciences. The IBU develops robust, scalable, and sustainable bioinformatics solutions that support both fundamental research and applied domains, including health, agriculture, and environmental sciences.
He also serves as Academic Director of the MSc in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, a joint program of the Universities of Bern and Fribourg, and contributes to national initiatives such as SwissBioData and Open Research Data (ORD). As a Group Leader at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), he is actively involved in community building, infrastructure development, and bioinformatics training.
He studied molecular biology at the University of Zurich, where he also earned his PhD. After postdoctoral research in bioinformatics and genomics at the Helmholtz Center Munich and Rutgers University (USA), he returned to Switzerland in 2009 to join ETH Zurich. In 2011, he moved to the University of Bern, where he established the Interfaculty Bioinformatics Unit (IBU).
