Dr. Lennart C. Karssen
Head of bioinformatics and data management, owner
In early 2014 I co-founded PolyOmica. My focus in the company is on all things computational and measurable. From teaching courses like Linux for Scientists, to developing software pipelines (preferably free/open source tools) for scientific data analysis to maintaining medium-sized Linux compute clusters.
Biography
I was trained as an experimental physicist at Utrecht University (The Netherlands) and obtained my PhD in experimental atomic and optical physics at the same university in 2008 with a thesis titled “Trapping ultracold atoms with ultrashort laser pulses”. In 2009 I worked at the National University of Rwanda as postdoc in the Research Commission and as senior lecturer at the Department of Physics. Upon my return to The Netherlands I worked for some time as a Unix/Linux consultant at a company called Snow (now SUE).
“Linux is the operating system for successful omics research”
From 2010–2013 I worked as a postdoc in bioinformatics and server guru in the Genetic Epidemiology group of Prof.Dr. Cornelia van Duijn at the Erasmus University Medical Centre, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. There I worked on various projects including the Genome of the Netherlands project which used a parent-offspring design to create a reference set for genomic imputations, and the exome sequencing project of the GRIP study, which sequenced the exomes of ~1300 people from an isolated population with more than 3000 deeply phenotyped people within a complex pedigree of more than 23,000 individuals spanning 23 generations.
As part of my academic work I have (co-)supervised one PhD thesis in Genetic Epidemiology, as well as one MSc thesis and four BSc theses in experimental physics. In 2015 I obtained an MSc in health sciences with specialisation in genetic epidemiology from the Erasmus University Rotterdam. An up-to-date list of my scientific publications can be found on ORCID.
A bit of history
PolyOmica was founded in early 2014, based on an earlier company founded in 2011 by Dr. Yurii Aulchenko. After many successful and fun years where Yurii and Lennart managed the company together, Yurii left PolyOmica in October 2022 to pursue other business and scientific adventures. Since then, Lennart has been running the company by himself.