Peter Dawyndt

Peter Dawyndt got the degree of M.Sc. in Mathematics in 1997 and M.Sc. in Computer Science in 1999, both from the Ghent University in Belgium. During the period 1999-2006 he worked at the Laboratory of Microbiology of the Ghent University, helping to establish a symbiosis between mathematics, computer science and the life sciences, as a means to further explore the diversification processes that drive evolution. In December 2004 he was assigned Doctor (Ph.D.) in Sciences, option Computer Science. Through his long-standing collaborations with Bernard De Baets, he also joined the research unit Knowledge-based Systems (KERMIT) at the Ghent University in 2005.

His research career somewhat became full circle, when in 2006 he was appointed as professor at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science of the Ghent University, where he is currently teaching courses in computer science.

He is the author of several peer reviewed papers published in international research journals, showing his main research interest in the design of a self-learning reasoning system for landscaping the bacterial diversity, used as a figure of speech for taxonomic modelling. Achieving this goal yet means that several major technical hurdles need to be overcome, including advancing the barriers of global data sharing, identify and come up with new ways to fill the gaps of observational efforts, and explore the possibilities of novel data mining techniques to the benefits of understanding microbial diversification. He is also regarded as the founding father of the StrainInfo.net bioportal.