A few months ago, I had finally started drafting my PhD thesis. My number one question at that time was: What text editor shall I open? I'm running Ubuntu, so using Microsoft Office Word was not an option, as installing this on a Linux machine can be very troublesome. Therefore, these were the options that … Continue reading Writing my PhD thesis in LaTeX: my personal experience
About the fact that I should be writing my PhD thesis. See you soon! Sander Inspired by Jaime
At the end of May, I was happy to hear that my second first-author paper, entitled Carrot juice fermentations as man-made microbial ecosystems dominated by lactic acid bacteria was published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology. I’m especially proud on this manuscript as we used different molecular (DNA vs RNA based 16S sequencing), analytical (HPLC-RI and … Continue reading Introducing comparative paperomics
Today is the first day of the 2018 World Cup football in Russia. While, I do not know a lot about football, I do enjoy cheering for the Red Devils at both the European and the World Cup. And so do most of my friends. That's why for the second time in a row, we … Continue reading Using Rvest to pick my 2018 World Cup fantasy team
In 2016, during Christmas break, I got bored and decided to experiment with an old Raspberry Pi that I had laying around. At that time, me and my colleague were in the middle of writing our first comparative genomics paper in which we compared an in-house sequenced bacterial isolate with all publicly available closely related … Continue reading Lactobacillus: the most commonly sequenced non-pathogenic bacterial genus
You should know that I'm a real DNA-junkie. When I heard about DNA the very first time in high school, I was really baffled with the fact that it can carry so much information just by repeating A, C, G and T's in a very long string. It contains the blueprint for almost every important … Continue reading From DNA to bitcoin: How I won the Davos DNA-storage Bitcoin Challenge
FWO-SB is a very important funding channel for PhD students in Flanders (Belgium). After submitting a proposal in September, PhD candidates have to defend their project for a jury in November/December. Usually the results appear online in mid-December, and for this year's call that was today: https://twitter.com/FWOVlaanderen/status/941261360108797952 Since I was a little bit curious about … Continue reading Amount of FWO-SB projects per Flemish university
Slack is a free to use communication platform for teams that allows its members to easily send messages, share files and manage to-do lists. As usual, when I hear that people are excited about a new tool or app, I can’t wait to test it out. So I introduced Slack to some of my colleagues, we … Continue reading Slack usage in our lab
Last year, June 2016, I had to opportunity to visit Nicola Segata's lab in Trento, Italy for a 1 month research stay. I contacted Nicola a few months before the actual stay, and was very delighted with his enthusiasm of hosting me. In addition, Trento is very close to the skiing area where me and … Continue reading From research stay to paper in one year: Story behind my first first-author paper.
