I lead the Interfaculty Bioinformatics Unit (IBU) at the University of Bern, which I established in 2011 to coordinate bioinformatics research, infrastructure, and support across multiple faculties. My focus lies in enabling researchers to generate insight from complex omics data — from genome and transcriptome assemblies to large-scale pan-genomic and metagenomic analyses.
Together with my team, the IBU has supported over 600 collaborative projects spanning medicine, biology, and veterinary sciences. Our goal is to deliver robust, scalable, and sustainable bioinformatics solutions tailored to both fundamental research and applied fields such as health, agriculture, and the environment.
I also serve as academic director of the MSc in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, a program run together with the University of Fribourg, and contribute to national initiatives such as SwissBioData and Open Research Data (ORD). I am a Group Leader at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), where I engage in community building, infrastructure development, and training.
I studied molecular biology at the University of Zurich and completed my PhD in the same field. Following postdoctoral research in bioinformatics and genomics at the Helmholtz Center Munich and Rutgers University (USA), I returned to Switzerland in 2009 to join ETH Zurich. In 2011, I moved to the University of Bern, where I founded the Interfaculty Bioinformatics Unit (IBU).
