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Pieter Moris

Postdoctoral Researcher Bioinformatics

Institute of Tropical Medicine Antwerp


I’m a biologist at heart with a passion for machine learning, statistics and scientific reproducibility.

After an education in both biology and statistical bioinformatics, I embarked upon my journey as a PhD student in the field of bioinformatics at the Adrem Data Lab of the University of Antwerp and the Biomina Research Network , where I leveraged machine learning and data mining methods to study molecular host-pathogen interactions and the immune system. My next role was that of Data Scientist in the Bioinformatics Unit at Galapagos , with a focus on improving scientific reproducibility and throughput via pipelines and containerization on cloud infrastructure, as well as assisting in drug target discovery projects by analysing transcriptomics experiments. Currently, I am a Postdoctoral Researcher Bioinformatics in the Unit of Malariology at the Institute of Tropical Medicine , where I am working on the molecular surveillance of malaria in travelers using whole-genome sequencing and machine learning approaches.

Interests

  • Bioinformatics ∪ computational biology
  • Machine learning & artificial intelligence
  • Data pipelines & scientific reproducibility
  • Genomics
  • Statistics
  • Systems biology
  • Immunoinformatics
  • Infectious diseases and parasitology

Education

  • PhD in Bioinformatics, 2021

    UAntwerpen

  • MSc Statistics - Bioinformatics, 2016

    UHasselt

  • MSc in Biology, 2014

    KU Leuven

  • BSc in Biology, 2012

    KU Leuven

Skills

Machine learning and deep learning

Bioinformatics / computational biology

Statistics

Python

R

Unix

Git version control

(Nextflow) Pipelines

Containerization

Server administration

High performance computing (VSC)

Cloud computing

LaTeX / Quarto / Knitr / Jupyter

Science communication

Education

Projects

Some things I’ve worked on

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SUMMIT

A GeoSentinel-ITM project for surveilling the genomic epidemiology of malaria in travelers.

Introduction to unix and sequencing pipelines

Course notes offering an introduction to (l)unix and the bioinformatics analysis of sequencing assays for malaria molecular …

Nf-core institutional config for CalcUA VSC

A config profile for using nf-core pipelines on the CalcUA HPC.

Workshop on collaborating in git

A workshop to introduce git to researchers with a focus on collaboration.

ImRex - CNN

Convolutional neural network for TCR-epitope recognition prediction using a combined sequence input represention.

MILES Subgraph Miner

A Java tool for mining subgraphs that are associated with a specific set of nodes in a network.

Docker primer

A hands-on introductory tutorial to Docker.

Computational skills primer

An overview of computational skills and tools required for suriving a PhD in bioinformatics.

Biomolecular id remapper

A Python script for remapping biomolecular identifiers via the UniProt API.

Tutorial on git internals

A light-hearted presentation on the inner workings of the git version control system

TCRex (server back end)

A web tool for the prediction of TCR–epitope recognition.

Gene Ontology scripts

A Python package and script for handling Gene Ontology data and performing enrichment tests.

Publications

Journal Current Challenges for Unseen-Epitope TCR Interaction Prediction and a New Perspective Derived from Image Classification.
. Briefings in Bioinformatics, 2020.

Code DOI

Journal Detection of enriched T cell epitope specificity in full T cell receptor sequence repertoires.
. Frontiers in Immunology, 2019.

Project DOI

Journal MILES: a Java tool to extract node-specific enriched subgraphs in biomolecular networks.
. Bioinformatics, 2019.

Code Project DOI

Journal No barrier breakdown between human and cattle schistosome species in the Senegal River Basin in the face of hybridisation.
. International Journal for Parasitology, 2019.

DOI

Journal Grasping frequent subgraph mining for bioinformatics applications.
. BioData Mining, 2018.

DOI

Journal The relationship between transmission time and clustering methods in Mycobacterium tuberculosis epidemiology.
. EBioMedicine, 2018.

DOI

Journal On the feasibility of mining CD8+ T cell receptor patterns underlying immunogenic peptide recognition.
. Immunogenetics, 2018.

DOI

Contact

  • Message me on Linkedin
  • My GitHub
  • ORCID
  • Google Scholar
  • PGP fingerprint: 3DA4 8C04 4736 4796 0490 D6D5 BD3B 7810 4AE1 D801 ()