Thomas Abeel

Thomas Abeel is an Associate Professor at the Department of Intelligent Systems of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science at the TU Delft. He is working with the Broad Bacterial Genomics group on several projects, including methods development projects.

He obtained his M.Sc. in Computer Science and Ph.D. in Biotechnology from Ghent University in the group of Yves Van de Peer, investigating machine learning approaches for biomarker discovery and visualization techniques for high throughput sequencing data. He performed postdoctoral research in the labs of James Galagan and Ashlee Earl at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard focusing on understanding the emergence of drug resistance through genomic and transcriptomic analyses of various pathogenic bacteria.

Dr. Abeel leads the Computational Microbial Genomics Group at the Delft Bioinformatics Lab. His team leverages computation and visualization to investigate the molecular activities of microbial organisms. He is interested in the effects of changes in genotype and their effects on molecular and extended phenotypes, in particular phenotypes of medical or industrial importance. In the medical area we focus on antibiotic resistance in pathogenic bacteria, while in the industrial arena we focus on mutations that affect yield and conversion efficiency. The group is specialized in creating novel algorithms to accurately reconstruct the complex heterogeneous genome and transcriptome architectures found in these organisms from large sequencing experiments and to identify relevant mutations.