Stein Aerts

Background

About Stein Aerts

Prof. Stein Aerts has a multidisciplinary background in both bio-engineering and computer science. During his PhD he was trained in bioinformatics, and during his Postdoc he worked on the genomics of gene regulation in Drosophila. Stein now heads the Laboratory of Computational Biology at the VIB and University of Leuven. His lab focuses on deciphering the genomic regulatory code, using a combination of single-cell, machine-learning, and experimental approaches. His recent scientific contributions include new bioinformatics methods for the analysis of single-cell gene regulatory networks, namely SCENIC and cisTopic; new experimental assays for single-cell ATAC-seq (HyDrop) and for massively parallel enhancer reporter assays; and deep learning implementations for enhancer modelling (DeepMEL & DeepFlyBrain). Stein co-founded the Fly Cell Atlas consortium and generated a single-cell atlas of the ageing Drosophila brain. Stein was awarded the 2017 Prize for Bioinformatics and Computational Science from the Biotech Fund and the 2016 Astrazeneca Foundation Award Bioinformatics. He is elected EMBO member since 2022, obtained an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2016, and an ERC Advanced Grant in 2022. Lab website: