Introducing new member of Bio2Q

We are delighted to welcome Dr.  Daniel Richard Mende as a PI at Bio-1 Core of Bio2Q.

The greeting from Dr. Mende is as follows.

“The goal of my research is to understand the microbial communities constituting the human microbiome, their inner workings and interactions with their host and environment. To achieve this goal, I use computational tools to process and analyze large datasets of ‘omics data at different levels of complexity, ranging from gene function and evolution to community-wide interactions.
Since my time as a PhD student at EMBL in Heidelberg, Germany, I have been studying microbial communities, by developing new tools and databases and using them to analyze and understand microbiomes. While most of my work has been focused on the human microbiome, I also apply a lot of ecological and physiological principles many of which I learned to appreciate during my postdoc which focused on marine microbial communities.

Before joining Bio2Q, I led a computational research group at the Amsterdam University Medical Centers. Our work there focused on the analyses of metagenomics sequencing data of different cohorts from the Netherlands as well as Ghana and Zambia. One focus of my research in Amsterdam was to understand the impact of antibiotic usage of the microbiome.

The vision for my lab at Bio2Q is to combine multi-omics datasets ((meta-)genomics, metabolomics, (meta-)transcriptomics, etc.) with mechanistic knowledge, microbial traits, and an evolution-based perspective to gain a deeper understanding of the microbiome function in health and disease. This starts with the annotations of genes, genomes, and molecules and culminates in the machine learning- or AI-based synthesis of large datasets describing these across whole cohorts and studies at different complexity levels. Such a challenge can only be completed by an inter-disciplinary team and I want to bring together researchers from different disciplines within Bio2Q to achieve these goals. At the same time, we want to make these results accessible to everyone in Bio2Q and the wider research community to enable easier and faster advances in our understanding of the microbiome.

We are a growing research group and are looking to welcome a new postdoc and graduate students interested in cutting edge microbiome research. ”

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