welcome!

My name is Laura, and I recently completed my Ph.D. in Computational Biology in Prof. Lior Pachter’s lab at the California Institute of Technology in the US. After earning my bachelor's and master's degrees in microbiology and biotechnology at Leiden University in the Netherlands, I followed my passion for genetics and entered the world of computational biology and bioinformatics, specifically the analysis of Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) data. Currently, I am developing a pipeline for the detection of previously unknown viral sequences in NGS data. Starting in September 2024, I will continue this work as a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Prof. Pardis Sabeti at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (with a joint affiliation with Harvard University). I am passionate about bridging the gap between biology and bioinformatics, having worked in both wet lab and computer science roles. My first software project, gget, which facilitates access to large genomic databases, has been downloaded over 100,000 times and has become a worldwide standard in transcriptomic and proteomic data processing. When I am not busy detecting bugs, you can find me hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains.