Group of Jan Aerts

Jan Aerts is lecturer of Visual Analytics at Hasselt University. He has a background in genetics and genomics, and performed his doctoral research at the University of Wageningen (Netherlands) on the Chicken Genome Sequencing Project. He was a postdoc at the Roslin Institute on the Cow Genome Sequencing Project (2005-2008), and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge (UK) focusing on structural variation in the human and other primate genomes (2008-2010). At his return to Belgium at the KU Leuven in 2010, he shifted focus to data visualization and visual analytics, with the aim of finding interesting questions in large datasets (big data). His main research topics revolve around visual design, interaction design, and (human and computational) scalability.

Jelmer is a PhD student at the Data Science Institute at UHasselt since 2020. He studies how topological data analysis techniques can be applied and extended to simplify obtaining interesting insights from data. Before starting his PhD, Jelmer studied Artificial Intelligence at the University of Groningen for his bachelor (2016) and master (2019). There, he became interested in combining machine learning and visual analytics to improve the understanding of complex data.