Dr. Harm Nijveen

On December 5th 2013 Harm Nijveen successfully defended his PhD thesis, entitled "Applications in Computer-Assisted Biology". Congratulations!

Biology is becoming a data-rich science driven by the development of high-throughput technologies like next-generation DNA sequencing. This is fundamentally changing biological reserach. The genome sequences of many species are becoming available, as well as the genetic variation within a species, and the activity of the genes in a genome under various condidtions. With the opportunities that these new technologies offer, comes the challenge to effectively deal with the large volues of data that they produce. Bioinformaticians have an important role to play in  organising and analysing these data to extract biological information and gain knowledge. Also for experimental biologists computers have become essential tools. This has created a strong need for software applicaions aimed at biological research.

In Harm's thesis he describes his contribution to this field of research. Together with molecular biologists, plant breeders, immunologists, and microbiologists, he has developed several software tools and performed computational analyses to study biological questions.