Arno Wegkamp

Background

About Arno Wegkamp

I have the drive to absorb information from many different fields of science: biology, physics, psychology, mathematics, nutrition and management. I extract useful information from these fields to use it for my personal development. This knowledge helped me to defended my doctoral thesis in 2008 at the Wageningen university. My PhD research topic was about being able to control vitamin B11 (folate) production in lactic acid bacteria. Hereafter, I have worked for 2.5 years at the Vrije University in Amsterdam, the topic was on using bacteria to remove contaminants from soil. Specifically, using mathematical models to predict these complex interactions. Hereafter I have worked for four years as project manager fermentation at NIZO food research at which I ran a wide range of projects on fermentation using food grade bacteria. During this work I have also acquired a renewed love for managing and visualizing large datasets. In my current positions at DSM (previously CSK food enrichment) I work as a fermentation scientist. Hereby I am setting up new high throughput screening methods and also assure the acidification performance of our strains is improved. In my role I combine these to areas by developing new methods to select the most useful strains within a shortest timespan. After acquiring the data, the data is processed in Python and R using all sorts of visualisation in web-based apps such as Shiny and Djangoo. Specialties: genetics, bacterial physiology, mathematical modeling, programming in R and python, developing websites for data visualization, metabolic pathways, project management and exploring human development.