Kris Laukens
Kris Laukens is associate professor in biodata mining and bioinformatics at the Biomedical informatics research center (biomina) and the Advanced database Research and Modelling (ADReM) group at the University of Antwerp. He has a background in Biology, and finished a PhD on the development and application of proteome analysis techniques. After his PhD, he worked on bioinformatics research projects within artificial intelligence and data mining research labs. In 2011 he co-founded and became coordinator of a new interdisciplinary research network (biomina), jointly established by University of Antwerpen and University Hospital Antwerpen (UZA). The consortium aims to address the growing accumulation of biological and clinical data by bringing together computational researchers, data mining techniques and biological or medical applications. Kris Laukens leads a biodata mining research team that has the ambition to remove crucial limitations in the interpretation of big molecular (such as genome, proteome and metabolome) data by introducing cutting-edge data mining technology. His core research interests are 1) biomolecular pattern discovery, i.e. the development, study and application of approaches to discover patterns in large scale molecular data, often with a focus on the interpretation of unexplained information, and 2) the reconstruction of large scale biomolecular network models using innovative data science approaches, targetting a variety of biological, biomedical and biotechnological applications.