Professor Chris Evelo is the founding head of the Department of Bioinformatics - BiGCaT at Maastricht University where he leads an enthusiastic group of researchers and he is a PI in the Maastricht Center for Systems Biology (MaCSBio). He holds a chair in bioinformatics for integrative systems biology; aiming at a better interpretation of experimental data through integration in data models that build on structuring existing knowledge.
His early career was in experimental biochemical toxicology where he also applied physiologically based biokinetic modelling. This, combined with subsequent experiences in nutrition and drug research and his broad interest made him a generalist, with a focus on the human interaction with the molecular environment.
Because integrative approaches are multi-faceted, he is involved in many projects related to capturing and processing experimental data. This includes the interoperability approaches underlying such efforts: standards, ontologies, mapping tools and documentation of the origin of the data and methods used (the provenance). He is a co-lead of the interoperability platform and the Dutch deputy Head of Node in ELIXIR, an intergovernmental organization that brings together life science resources from across Europe. He is active in ELIXIR communities on systems biology, rare disease, toxicology and nutrition and a few others, and a member of the strategic team of the Dutch ELIXIR node and involved services coordinated by that node. Chris is one of the authors of the original paper on FAIR guiding principle for scientific data.
One of the main aspects of his work is the organization of existing knowledge which centers around WikiPathways, a resource for community curation of biological pathways. He is a board member of the Open PHACTS foundation, a think tank for large-scale knowledge structuring of relations between chemicals, gene-products, pathways and diseases. Open PHACTS’ focus is on drug discovery and repositioning, but the approach is useful in many other fields. For pathway analysis, and thereby integration of data and knowledge, Chris’ group developed PathVisio, a modular open-source pathway curation and analysis tool to which different research groups can, and do, contribute by developing plugins and research applications. His group also developed apps to link pathway analysis to network analysis in Cytoscape and to allow network extension with targeted relationships. To do all that data linking effectively they use BridgeDb, an ELIXIR recommended interoperability resource, which is based on a reusable open-source software framework and also available as web service that is in the core of Cytoscape and PathVisio.
Chris was scientific advisor for the recent IMI project for translational quantitative systems biology (TransQST). He was a partner in the COST CHARME project for harmonization of standards in biology and in the EU H2020 toxicology projects Eu-ToxRisk and OpenRiskNet and currently leads the research line directed at an in silico platform for chemical risk evaluation in the Dutch national science agenda project Virtual Human Platform for Safety, where he also works on establishing ties with EOSC and EOSC-Life. He co-leads the systems biology work package in the European Joint Project for Rare Diseases. Experiences from which he also uses in the COVID19-Disease Map project and the more general Disease Map project. In the nutrition domain he is part of the management team of the nutrigenomics organization NuGO, partner in the Food Nutrition Security Cloud (FNS-cloud) project and the new NUTRIOME Marie Curie Doctoral Network. He helped conceptualize and develop the phenotype database. This works aims at using the overarching European research infrastructure including core data resources and deposition databases with specific adaptations to allow capturing and analysis of data from nutritional and more in general metabolic studies including microbiome. For data organization he also was a member in the IMI project FAIRplus that wrote the FAIR-cookbook where he worked on mappings between equivalent FAIR data identifiers and ontological terms. Chris’s ORCID is: ORCID:0000-0002-5301-3142. A list of publications can be found on Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=2dm_Du0AAAAJ, his Twitter handle is @Chris_Evelo.
Netherlands