Kia ora,

My name is Lesley, i’m a Dutch science nerd with a BASc Biochemistry (InHolland), MSc bio-informatics (VU Amsterdam) and PhD in computational biology (50% of which was wet-lab microbiology) at the Bio-Protection Research Centre and AgResearch in New Zealand. Currently doing Postdoctoral work in the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

I like weird projects, i went from internships in plant disease identification (where i made more messes than i can recall), to fluorescent microscopy looking for potentially aneurysm causing proteins. I did computational work comparing tomato plant genomes, and developed a QTL analysis pipeline meant for different crops (Due to an NDA, i cannot confirm or deny that this might have been used only once). I worked in seed purity QC labs, and in chemical labs checking quality of activated charcoal products (one of my favorite jobs ever!). Jumped across the pond to analyze and compare insecticidal bacterial plasmids. And now am identifying ancient diseases across the globe and trying to help answer some evolutionary questions surrounding disease proliferation.

My interests in regards to bio-informatics large-scale data processing and visualization, as this often yields insights into interesting macro-evolution. But I’m also still very much a microbiologist/molecular biologists that likes to get his hands dirty.