I graduated from Ghent University as Bioscience Engineer in Cell and Gene Biotechnology in 2005. In 2009 I obtained a PhD from Ghent University studying the molecular interaction between plants and plant-parasitic nematodes. During my postdoc, I further specialized in computational biology and bioinformatics while working with different high throughput sequencing datasets. In 2013 I joined the Plant Sciences Department of Flanders Research Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (ILVO) as one of the core members of the Genomics Platform. As a high throughput sequencing specialist, I am involved in different projects using a variety of techniques such as metabarcoding, whole genome shotgun sequencing, transcriptome sequencing, genotyping-by-sequencing, etc. applied both on plants and on plant-associated (micro)organisms.