Tim Van Den Bossche, Ghent University, Biomolecular Medicine, Ghent, Belgium Host supervisor and host laboratory: Dr Thilo Muth, eScience Division, BAM, Berlin, Germany Dates: 01 August to 01 October 2020 Member Society: Belgian Society for Microbiology "After obtaining my AD degree in Chemistry/Biochemistry and my BSc/MSc degree in Biomedical Sciences, I applied for a position as PhD student in the CompOmics group of Prof. Lennart Martens. Since October 2016 I am working here in the field of computational metaproteomics under co-supervision of Dr. Thilo Muth (eScience division, BAM) and Dr. Bart Mesuere (Ghent University). My main focus lies on applying and tweaking machine learning algorithms to improve peptide identifications in metaproteomics experiments. When I received the FEMS Research & Training Grant in the Summer of 2019, I was very excited to go to the BAM Institute in Berlin, Germany for a few months during Summer of 2020. I made immediately plans with my supervisor - he even provided me with some cultural must-do's for Berlin. More than a year after I received the grant, it will not come as a surprise, that my research stay was completely different than imagined due to the many COVID restrictions. I even had to postpone this research visit for a while, but luckily FEMS was flexible enough to allow this. During the research stay, my supervisor provided me with all the help he could give, which I am very grateful for. I am invited to go back to the institute in post-COVID times, which I will definitely do. One of the strong suits of FEMS is stimulating international collaboration by providing travel grants - this is something they have to keep doing." |
