Gertjan Bisschop
Senior Software Engineer at VITO
Molise, Belgium
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolGertjan Bisschop is a Senior Software Engineer and research data infrastructure architect with a PhD in statistical genomics and eight years of experience building scalable scientific software. He has led development of high-performance genomic tooling—most notably as lead developer of msprime—optimizing core C/Python coalescent algorithms to handle millions of samples and integrating C-level interfaces with NumPy/Pandas for seamless pipelines. His background blends statistical genetics, mathematical training, and software engineering, evidenced by a 1000x speedup through a graph-based automatic differentiation toolkit and production-ready likelihood optimization pipelines. At Oxford he combined machine learning (including RNNs on genome graphs) with mentorship of PhD researchers, and now applies that research-to-production ethos at VITO. Based in Molise, Belgium, he champions FAIR data practices and open-source scientific Python tooling, bringing both deep domain knowledge and pragmatic engineering to complex data infrastructure problems. An underappreciated strength is his ability to translate advanced population-genetics algorithms into robust, maintainable libraries that scale in real-world analyses.
8 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Statistical genetics, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Statistical genetics at The University of EdinburghMaster, Biology, General, Master, Biology, General at Universiteit GentMathematics, Mathematics at Ghent University
Github Skills (60)
simulation10
genetics10
genome10
simulate10
package-management10
args10
conda10
genetic10
forge10
bioinformatics10
genomics10
owl10
sequence10
linked-open-data9
skos9
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
LohseLab/agemo
Dec 2021 - Jan 2023
Laplace transformed coalescence time distributions
Contributions:2 releases, 1 review, 66 commits in 1 year 1 month
distributionspythonlaplacecoalescentcoalescence
GertjanBisschop/tskit
May 2019 - Mar 2023
The tree sequence toolkit
Contributions:16 pushes, 7 branches in 3 years 10 months
bioinformaticssequence
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