Prof. Robert Waterhouse (Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Lausanne, and Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Lausanne, Switzerland)

Robert Waterhouse is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Lausanne, and a Group Leader affiliated to the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. His research is focused on data-driven bioinformatics methods development for comparative evolutionary and functional genomics of insects and other arthropods. He developed these interests in computational biology solutions to interrogate genomics data initially during his PhD at Imperial College London and subsequently as part of his postdoctoral research at the University of Geneva and as a Marie Curie Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is actively involved in several genomics consortia including the i5k 5'000 arthropod genomes initiative and the European Reference Genome Atlas, helping to coordinate genome data generation efforts that will greatly augment the genomic sampling of Earth's biodiversity.