Dr. Lennart C. Karssen
Head of bioinformatics and data management
In the autumn of 2013 I joined Yurii in PolyOmica. My focus in the company is on all things computational and measurable. From teaching courses like Linux for Scientists, doing programming work on (preferably) free/open source tools for scientific data analysis to maintaining medium-sized Linux compute clusters. My scientific focus currently lies on a genome-wide association study for lower back pain.
Biography
I was trained as an experimental physicist at Utrecht University (The Netherlands) and obtained my PhD in experimental atomic and optical physics at the same university in 2008 with a thesis titled “Trapping ultracold atoms with ultrashort laser pulses”. In 2009 I worked at the National University of Rwanda as postdoc in the Research Commission and as senior lecturer at the Department of Physics. Upon my return to The Netherlands I worked for some time as a Unix/Linux consultant at a company called Snow.
“Linux is the operating system for successful omics research”
From 2010–2013 I worked as a postdoc in bioinformatics and server guru in the Genetic Epidemiology group of Prof.Dr. Cornelia van Duijn at the Erasmus University Medical Centre, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. There I worked on various projects including the Genome of the Netherlands project which used a parent-offspring design to create a reference set for genomic imputations, and the exome sequencing project of the GRIP study, which sequenced the exomes of ~1300 people from an isolated population with more than 3000 deeply phenotyped people within a complex pedigree of more than 23,000 individuals spanning 23 generations.
As part of my academic work I have (co-)supervised one PhD thesis in Genetic Epidemiology, as well as one MSc thesis and four BSc theses in experimental physics. In 2015 I obtained an MSc in health sciences with specialisation in genetic epidemiology from the Erasmus University Rotterdam. An up-to-date list of my scientific publications can be found on ORCID.
Dr. Yurii S. Aulchenko
Founder (has left PolyOmica in October 2022)
I have started PolyOmica in spring 2011. Having training in biology and working for a decade in a leading Medical Centre, I have a broad overview of the process which brings you from an idea to a result. My focus in PolyOmica was on research process organisation and as the lead complex traits and functional genomics expert.
Biography
I was trained as biologist and geneticist and have been working in the field of statistical genomics since 1995. My interests lie in understanding the mechanisms of control of complex traits through application of quantitative biology and classical genetic approaches. To facilitate such understanding, I work on developing mathematical methods, computational algorithms and software and applies these to answer a wide range of questions in in fields of statistical genomics, genetic epidemiology, statistical omics, and precision medicine. My interests were concentrated in plant and animal genetics at the early stages of my career, with interest shifting to human statistical genomics and then later to a broader field of statistical omics.
I have large experience of leading research projects in a wide range of environments. The list of my publications can be found in my Google Scholar profile. In 2015, I have entered the Thomson-Reuters list of “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” in the category “Molecular Biology & Genetics” and in 2018 the Clarivate Analytics’ “Highly Cited Researcher”, category “Cross-field”.