Sasker Grootjans

Background

About Sasker Grootjans

8 years of exprience in leading IT projects and programs at a global biopharmaceutical company - 11 years of experience in research environment (wet and dry lab) and biotechnology development - Multilingual Ph.D, M.Sc. & M.Eng. in Biotechnology - Cross-functional experience in biotechnology, bio-informatics, electronics, IT and innovation - Formerly at KULeuven, CNIO, VIB & UGent CORE COMPETENCES - LEADING IT PROJECTS AND PROGRAMS Leading GxP and non-GxP projects to deploy off-the-shelf or customized commercial solutions for statistical analysis, image analysis, PKPD and toxicity. Building innovative solutions with cross-functional teams when no suitable commercial solution is available. Leading various data integration programmes for early research data. RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT Medical biotechnological research in top-level research institutions (CNIO, VIB) and universities (KULeuven, UGent) in departments focused on oncology and immunology. Extensive experience with many biotechnological methods used in signal transduction research at DNA, mRNA, protein and cellular level. INNOVATION Development of a novel automated technology for the detection of cell death rate and type, which reduced the hands-on time from 24 hours to 1 hour. Winner of the VIB PhD Student Creativity and Innovation Award 2013:"Using open-source electronics to build innovative lab devices". LEADING PEOPLE Leading cross-functional teams in a bioparmaceutical company to deliver highly complex projects and programs at the intersection of biology, bio-informatics and IT, leveraging the latest technology, such as VR and AI. Supervision of 9 Bachelor/Master students and their research projects. INFORMATICS/BIO-INFORMATICS Extensive hands-on expertise with - Python & Perl programming, leveraging and deploying open source code for machine learning, docker, computational clusters - FAIR data integration - Microsoft Office 365 (Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, Teams, Sharepoint, PowerApps and PowerAutomate); Familiar with Microsoft 365 Copilot- Scientific software packages for statistics (Graphpad Prism, JMP), genome annotation (Ensembl-API, Biomart, NCBI/Entrez), pathway analysis (Cytoscape, Genevestigator, DAVID and Ingenuity Pathway Analysis), protein 3D structure (Pymol), molecular cloning (VectorNTI), scientific reference software (Endnote), image management and analysis (Omero, Fiji, Cellprofiler.)