Over the past 15 years, Professor Alan Christoffels has worked on various genome projects with a focus on genome annotation and sequence data analysis as it pertains to genome evolution. Through these projects, he has played a leading role in directing genomics research on the African continent within the context of disease vectors linked to Trypanosomiasis and Malaria. Through this work, he has built a strong track record of training students (21 PhD and 18 MSc students) and has successfully managed a large team of researchers and graduated students to deliver on project deadlines. The success of an interdisciplinary team requires communication skills to understand the needs and expectations of a diverse group of researchers. He feel that he has demonstrated this quality in the active participation in five international genome consortia.
Prof Christoffels's group develops methods for analysing high throughput sequencing data in the context of infectious disease models. Specifically they are developing a computational toolkit for bacterial genome analyses. Through this work, they are pushing the envelope with new technologies to model genome data in a graph database. As of April 2016, four of their tuberculosis drug targets are in the Seattle Structural Genomics Center for Infectious Disease pipeline for protein structure determination. They extended their tools to building informatics tools for biobanking since 2013. In this context, they developed an open-source LIMS tool for genetics researchers in partnership with European research teams (http://www.baobablims.org). Data governance as it pertains to research data and biospecimens has been a passion of him and projects in his lab has focused on software to manage biospecimens (www.baobablims.org) and data security policies at universities.
Lab WebPage: http://christoffels.sanbi.ac.za
Current Position (since 2010): Director of the South African National Bioinformatics Institute.
