Hello, I’m Dimi. I’m a bioscience engineer and computational biologist from Belgium. My mission and career focus is to help solve meaningful problems in society within the fields of AI and biology by leveraging and developing digital biology tools and systems. In doing so, I aim to contribute to science-driven positive impact on the world.
I currently work at SwiftPharma, a Belgian startup that aims to turn plants into biofactories to produce therapeutic proteins in a sustainable and scalable manner.
I work on all of the computational biology efforts at SwiftPharma to help produce proteins in plants effectively and in a scalable manner. Below, you can find an extensive timeline of my career.
I’m also quite active on Twitter/X and write here on Substack about the intersection of technology and biology, along with career-related experiences.
Career timeline
September 2024 - Present
I work at SwiftPharma as a computational biologist. We are a Belgian startup that produces therapeutic proteins using plants as a production platform, making it a sustainable and scalable solution.
November 2023 - July 2024
I’m a computational biology specialist at the Berkeley Lab. I’m on a Fulbright scholarship for nine months, during which I will continue my research on phage-host interactions and develop AI tools to predict and better understand phage-host interactions. In addition, I also aim for this Fulbright project to facilitate a knowledge transfer and cultural exchange between the US and Belgium.
In April ‘24, I gave a short talk on my latest research for the 4th season of the iVoM webinar series.
October 2018 - October 2023
I did a PhD in Bioscience Engineering: Biotechnology. My research focused on using machine learning to predict and understand bacterium-phage interactions. I developed several machine learning tools to predict phage hosts, identify certain phage proteins from their genomes and predict interactions between phages and hosts at the most specific level. Here is some of my published work:
DepoScope: accurate phage depolymerase annotation and domain delineation using large language models (2024, PLOS Computational Biology).
Prediction of Klebsiella phage-host specificity at the strain level (2024, Nature Communications).
Identification of phage receptor-binding protein sequences with hidden Markov models and an extreme gradient boosting classifier (2022, Viruses).
Digital phagograms: predicting phage infectivity through a multilayer machine learning approach (2022, Current Opinion in Virology).
Predicting bacteriophage hosts based on sequences of annotated receptor-binding proteins (2021, Scientific Reports).
All of the tools I have developed are available on my GitHub!
In addition, I have had various opportunities to communicate my scientific work to both scientific and general audiences:
Microbiology Society Annual Conference (April 2023). I was an invited speaker at the Microbiology Society Annual Conference in Birmingham (UK), where I gave a 30 min talk on the various applications of machine learning in the field of phage research.
Protein embeddings workshop for BioLizard (May 2022). I gave an introductory workshop on working with protein language models and their embeddings. The workshop can be found in this GitHub repo.
International Virus Bioinformatics meeting 2022 (March 2022). I was a selected oral speaker at the ViBioM 2022 conference, which was held online due to COVID restrictions.
Guest post for Capsid & Tail (February 2022). I was invited to write a guest post in the weekly email letter Capsid & Tail about our opinion piece on digital phagograms. The guest post can be found here.
Dag van de Wetenschap (November 2020, in Dutch). I have an oral presentation about the antibiotic resistance crisis and alternative solutions at the first all-online Dag van de Wetenschap (a popular Belgian science event). I also wrote a Dutch blog post about it, which you can find here.
FWO Kennismakers Magazine (October 2020, in Dutch). I was interviewed for the new, all-digital magazine of the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO) about my PhD research. You can find the Dutch article here.
In his immensely popular and thoughtful book Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari writes about the ‘train of progress‘ in the 21st century: “In the early twenty-first century the train of progress is again pulling out of the station – and this will probably be the last train ever to leave the station called Homo sapiens. Those who miss this train will never get a second chance. In order to get a seat on it you need to understand twenty-first-century technology, and in particular the powers of biotechnology and computer algorithms.“
Do you want to connect or stay up-to date?
Well if you do, you can either connect with me on X, LinkedIn, or subscribe to my blog!
