Tom Ederveen PhD

Over Tom Ederveen

I am a biomedical postdoc c.q. bioinformatician at the Radboudumc Nijmegen, currently active as a computational biologist at the Medical BioSciences department (MBS). As a senior researcher, I work in dynamic collaboration and support of many different departments and disciplines within our institute, most notably the departments of (experimental) Dermatology, Medical Microbiology and Pediatrics. I further fulfil the role of project (WP) leader in large consortia, and I am the daily co-supervisor of multiple PhD students and research support members.

I see myself as a biologist applying public bioinformatics tools and approaches in order to make sense out of data generated from human samples from various biological sources. Being originally trained as a lab technician and medical biologist, together with an extensive postgraduate training as a bioinformatician, enables me to ‘speak the language’ of both wet- and dry lab researchers. Because of this unique combination, I build bridges across different biomedical domains that typically focus on immunological research topics involving inflammatory or infectious diseases. This furthermore enables me as a bioinformatician to extract biological hypotheses and mechanisms from complex biomedical data sets, and importantly, to experimentally validate these together with my colleagues in the lab.

I have a strong position in the Radboud Technology Center (RTC) for Bioinformatics, where I mainly manage in-house contract research on the topic of microbiomics, including R&D and maintenance of its analytical and computational infrastructure. I’ve also become the initiator of a ‘microbial analysis’ community, the Radboud Microbiomics Initiative (RMI), which facilitates microbiomics research support, collaborations and knowledge sharing between various clinically-oriented departments in our hospital. Furthermore, I am chair of the section Microbial Bioinformatics of the Royal Dutch Society of Microbiology (KNVM).

Over the years, my focus and research work further extended to outside of our institute, and to many types of (multi)omics, molecular and clinical/biomedical data analysis. For this reason, data harmonization and data integration processes have become an important element in my research, all primarily in context of (bio)medical and clinical research.

As of 2020, I am also strongly involved in research efforts and development related to FAIR, i.e. to make scientific data Findable Accessible Interoperable and Reusable. Here, I am working on FAIR schema's, data standards and systems such as FAIR data points, in order to make the data that we work with available to the world in a human- and machine-readable fashion.