As bioscience engineer, Frederik Coppens obtained a PhD studying leaf development in arabidopsis thaliana. During his PhD he made the shift from wet lab to bioinformatics. As post‐doc in the group of Dirk Inzé, Coppens focussed on the latter, and developed and implemented an end‐to‐end RNA‐seq workflow for the VIB‐UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology.

In 2013, he became project lead of the Applied Bioinformatics and Biostatistics group, providing support for data analysis to the researchers of the Center. In 2015, he was appointed head of the PSB IT team, which manages an on‐premise compute cluster, cloud environment and data storage array. And in 2023, Frederik Coppens took on the role of Head of the VIB Data Core.

For the past decade, he has also been involved in ELIXIR, the European Research Infrastructure for data in Life Sciences. Since 2019, he’s Head of Node at ELIXIR Belgium, with its focus on data management and reproducible analysis. His team is also involved in numerous European projects (e.g. the Genomic Data Infrastructure project, which will deploy an interoperable infrastructure for sensitive data across Europe).