The driving force in my research is curiosity and interest in
transforming often large and complex data sets
from biological experiments into knowledge and biological
understanding. I have been involved in the analysis of
Next Generation Sequencing data from different areas such as
ancient DNA, metagenomics, commensal and bacterial
pathogens and human genetics for more
than six years.
I have always been very interested in bacterial
evolution and genetics, exemplified by my
work on vaccine development for Mycobacterium
tuberculosis, transcriptomic analyses of Bacillus
subtilis, building the computational and analytical
infrastructure for the Centre for Genetic Epidemiology (CGE), large
scale metagenomic analysis of the human gut
microbiome and recently my work on Yersinia
pestis. In this study we re-constructed the ancient
genomes of Y. pestis from the Bronze Age yielding
unprecedented insights into plague evolution. The
paper was published as the cover story in Cell, was
reported in Nature and Science news and in more than 300 articles
in the world press within 12 hours. The webservers I was part of
building for the CGE project have had more than 7,000 users and
200,000 submissions (January, 2016). Finally, I am involved in
large sequencing projects such as the Danish
Pangenome, where I was the corresponding author on the
first paper published from the consortium. Based on this work I am
now the DTU representative of the “Reference group for
Personalized Medicine Initiative in Denmark”.
I am currently building a research group to study the
evolution of human pathogens where I at the moment
have one PhD student studying evolution of Mitis group
streptococci, a group of oral commensal bacteria that can cause
fatal heart infections.