Marcel van Batenburg

Introduction

Marcel van Batenburg received his PhD in the field of experimental nuclear physics (department of physics and astronomy) at University Utrecht in 2001. He switched from physics to genetics and became an expert in the field of functional genomics. He performed his research as a post-doc in the group of professor Harmen Bussemaker at Columbia University and subsequently in the bioinformatics laboratory of professor Antoine van Kampen at Academic Medical Center. In 2009, he joined the BDA group as a post-doc within the Netherlands Metabolomics Center (NMC) to gain knowledge about metabolomics, and thereby to broaden his expertise on genomics and statistics.

Research project

In the field of metabolomics hundreds of metabolites are measured simultaneously by different analytical platforms to obtain their concentration in a reliable way. This research project concerns with the development of data fusion approaches, in which analytical repeatability of each platform (based on data of a sample that is analyzed repeatedly by the same platform) and biological reproducibility (based on data of different individuals having e.g. the same disease) are accounted for, to obtain a comprehensive and reliable set of biomarkers e.g. disease-related markers. The developed approaches will be useful for other projects within NMC, where bio-samples are analyzed repeatedly by different platforms.