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.