Frederik Coppens

As Head of Node of ELIXIR Belgium, Frederik is leading the development of the Belgian ELIXIR node. He represents ELIXIR Belgium in the ELIXIR Heads of Nodes Committee, attending strategic meetings and ensuring smooth information exchange related to ELIXIR both internally within the node as towards the ELIXIR Hub.

Within ELIXIR Europe, Frederik is involved in the Plant Community and is co-chair of the Galaxy Community. The ELIXIR Plant Community focusses in the ELIXIR-EXCELERATE H2020 project on making plant phenotyping data FAIR by developing and implementing metadata (Minimal Information About a Plant Phenotyping Experiment - MIAPPE) and data access (Breeding API) standards. The Galaxy Community is active in the area of scientific workflows and aims to enable researchers to perform bioinformatics analysis workflows through a user-friendly online interface (Galaxy). For more technically advanced users, cloud-oriented technologies (e.g. BioContainers), are being developed, in which the Belgian Node also is involved.

At the VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology, Frederik is IT manager and Project Leader of the Applied Bioinformatics and Biostatistics (ABB) group. The mission of the ABB group is to enable (wetlab) scientist to perform bioinformatics and biostatistical analyses. Frederik’s team provides consultancy to optimise the setup of the experiment, generation of data and analysis for biostatistics and bioinformatics in general. Moreover, solutions are foreseen for divers NGS applications through implementation of standard workflows in Galaxy or through custom data analysis. The combination with IT manager enables optimisation of the required IT infrastructure towards the data analysis and storage needs of our researchers.

Frederik is member of the Work Group Open Science and Innovation of the `Europa platform' of the Flemish Government. He was also appointed as the Belgian representative in the Strategy Working Group for Data, Computing and Digital Research Infrastructures (SWG DIGIT) of the European Commission (October 2017). This new work group currently focusses on evaluating the e-needs aspect in new ESFRI proposals.