Invited speakers

Lennart Martens is Senior Full Professor of Systems Biology at Ghent University and Group Leader of the Computational Omics and Systems Biology (CompOmics) group at VIB, in Ghent, Belgium.

He has been working in mass spectrometry-related bioinformatics since his Master’s degree, which focused on the computational interpretation of peptide mass spectra, and the sequence-dependent fragmentation of peptides. He then worked as a software developer and framework architect for a software company for a few years, before returning to Ghent University to pursue a Ph.D. in proteomics and proteomics informatics. During this time, he worked on the development of high-throughput peptide centric proteomics techniques and on bioinformatics tools to support these new approaches. In 2003 he designed and built the PRIDE repository for the global dissemination of proteomics data at EMBL-EBI as a Marie Curie fellow of the European Commission. After obtaining his Ph.D., he rejoined EMBL-EBI to coordinate the newly created PRIDE group for the next three years. He then moved back to Ghent University and VIB to take up his current positions, focusing on novel machine learning algorithms for mass spectrometry data analysis, and their application to the large-scale orthogonal reprocessing of public proteomics data.