About Boas

I’m a microbial bioinformatician, currently working for the RIVM (Rijksinstituut voor Volksgezondheid en Milieu). Our team develops and maintains bioinformatics solutions for other groups within the RIVM (specifically IDS/Centre for Infectious Diseases Research, Diagnostics and Laboratory Surveillance).

In 2022, I joined the board of the Special Interest Group for Bioinformaticians in Medical Microbiology (page in Dutch), in the Netherlands. This group is part of the working group of Molecular Diagnostics of Infectious Diseases (WMDI), of the Dutch Association for Medical Microbiology.

I code mainly in Python, R and am comfortable working on the command line and in HPC environments. I’m a big fan of using workflow managers (mainly Snakemake), open source software and learning how the field of microbial bioinformatics functions and progresses.

For collaborations or questions, please reach out to me through Twitter or through filling out this Google Form.

Background

My university training focused mainly on wet-lab microbiological research, with some dry-lab elements. During microbiology internships I found out I was leaning more and more towards dry-lab analyses, and I was fortunate enough to find a PhD position which couples genomics methods to relevant and interesting AMR-focused questions. During my PhD with Constance Schultsz (2017-2021), I could fully focus on using genomics to study antimicrobial resistance and the dissemination of Escherichia coli. This research was completed at the Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development (AIGHD). I joined the group of Nina van Sorge at Amsterdam UMC and the Netherlands Reference Laboratory for Bacterial Meningitis (NRLBM) for a year (2021-2022), during which I learned a lot more about microbial genomics in public health.

In my free time, I enjoy walking, cooking and playing games.