"I have been fascinated with understanding how things work since I was a child."

Two of the qualities that all Lizards pride themselves on are flexibility and striving for excellence. Alexander Koch , our team lead for Bioinformatics, definitely embodies them both.

“If you look at my CV,” Alexander says, “You’ll see that there is a one-year gap between obtaining my Masters degree and starting my PhD. Throughout high school and university, I spent most of my free time on the water in a rowing boat.”?

But Alexander was not just any rower - he made it to the national team at both the junior and senior levels! During his year on the water, Alexander got to train and race with Olympic athletes all over Europe. Luckily for us, though, he decided to return to biology after this gap year, and found his way to BioLizard, where he is now a senior bioinformatics scientist and the Team Lead for Bioinformatics.?

Ever since he was a kid, Alexander has been fascinated by biology, and understanding how things work. “I remember trying to code games on an old cassette tape-era computer,” Alexander reflects, “so it wasn’t that surprising after all that I ended up in bioinformatics.”?

Alexander's return to biology after his year of rowing began by studying bio-science engineering, followed by a PhD in bioinformatics. After his PhD, Alexander worked for a few years as a post-doc at Maastricht University, where his focus was on integrating large scale genomics datasets to discover new epigenetic biomarkers that could be used to diagnose cancer and predict patient responses to therapy. Alongside this strong focus on cancer immunology, Alexander also worked on finding new and better ways to visualise large genomics datasets, and ended up developing and publishing several visualisation applications.?

It was this deep understanding of bioinformatics that eventually led Alexander to BioLizard in the fall of 2021. “Together with our Bioinformatics team, I tackle all sorts of omics-related questions, from proteomics to whole-genome sequencing,” Alexander says. And of course, he also still gets to work on one of his old favourite topics: data visualisation.?Effective data visualisation is an essential component in clarifying the value and insights contained within complex datasets, and Alexander is highly skilled at helping BioLizard's customers achieve this.

As team lead, Alexander has a focus on not only supporting clients by delivering the best science and solutions to them, but also takes care to support his team. “It is my ambition to grow as a team lead, to help the people in my team become better scientists, and to create and maintain a healthy and motivating work environment.” Alexander strongly believes that having a happy and motivated team is essential to producing work of the highest quality.?

Both in a boat, and at the office, it is clear that Alexander values teamwork and collaboration. As well as supporting his own team, Alexander often collaborates with the other teams at BioLizard, such as our Data Management team. In fact, he recently co-presented a webinar on the topic of Data Management, together with our team lead for Data Management, Yves Muyssen , and in collaboration with flanders.bio . You can watch it here!?

Next week, we’ll dive deeper into our whole Bioinformatics team, and what they can do! Be sure to follow us on LinkedIn to stay up to date with our #MeetTheLizards campaign - or, reach out to us now to start collaborating with Alexander and his team on your next bioinformatics project.