Associated Partner
SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) is a non-profit organisation that coordinates research and education in bioinformatics throughout Switzerland and provides high quality bioinformatics services (e.g. UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot, SWISS-MODEL, STRING, ExPASy ) to the national and international research community. SIB comprises over 56 research and service groups in Swiss universities, technical (ETH/EPF) and applied universities (HES).
SIB acts as the Data Coordination & Bioinformatics Hub for Obelisk. Through its Vital-IT competence centre, SIB has designed and deployed a federated, FAIR-compliant infrastructure that connects childhood-obesity cohorts across Europe. This system enables secure, privacy-preserving analyses without moving sensitive data.
Their work spans three major components:
- Data harmonisation and standardisation
- Federated infrastructure deployment
- Remote analysis and open science tools
Beyond infrastructure, SIB ensures GDPR-compliant data handling, delivers the data management plan, and contributes to the dissemination and reuse of Obelisk’s federated-analysis software. In short, SIB provides the secure data backbone, the analytical engine, and the FAIR-data services that make Obelisk’s large-scale, pan-European cohort federation and precision-medicine objectives possible.
People
Mark is Director of the Vital-IT competence center of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics in Lausanne. He obtained a PhD from the University in London and did a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Lausanne before moving into the field of computational biology. In recent years he has been involved in several European projects, many in the field of diabetes, where his group has worked on providing expertise in multi-omics data integration and analysis for biomarker discovery in type 2 diabetes and its complications.
Florence Mehl is a computational biologist at the Vital-IT competence center of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics in Lausanne. She obtained a PhD in chemistry from the Aix-Marseille University in Marseille, then she moved to metabolomics with a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Geneva. Since 2015, she has developed expertise in multiomics data integration and is involved in data analysis for several European projects in the field of diabetes and its complications.
Frédéric holds a biology diploma and a license in informatics and has more than 15 years of experience in bioinformatics and data analysis. At the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, he focuses on developing tools for data capture, analysis, visualisation, and knowledge integration. His expertise spans statistics, R programming, multi-omics workflows, and clinical data standards. Frédéric is also actively involved in teaching and mentoring, notably through R courses at both beginner and advanced levels.
Anne is a biologist at the Vital-IT competence centre of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics in Lausanne, with more than 20 years of experience in data curation. Her expertise includes the harmonisation of clinical and chemical data, the use and development of biomedical ontologies, and the application of standards and quality guidelines. These skills enabled her to deliver rigorous curation work in several European research projects related to diabetes.
Iulian holds a master's degree in Geophysics from the University of Bucharest. He has been a software engineer at the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics since 2016, specialising in database architecture, data federation technologies, and the design and implementation of advanced analytical tools in R.
Robin Liechti is a Swiss bioinformatics scientist working at the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics in the Vital-IT group since 2006, where he leads computational biology efforts. His expertise spans database development, web application design and development, data visualisation, data management, and biological data analysis. He has contributed to several research projects including IMI initiatives and developed resources such as SwissLipids and clinical diagnostic pipelines.
Van Du Thuong Tran
Van Du graduated from Ecole Polytechnique (France) with a background in computer science and bioinformatics, followed by a PhD focused on transmembrane protein structure prediction. He then pursued postdoctoral research at the University of Paris-Saclay and CNRS, specialising in microRNA prediction and transcriptomics profiling. Since 2014, he has been part of Vital-IT at the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, contributing to research and teaching activities in federated algorithms, multimodal data integration, machine learning, and omics data analysis.
Lou Götz holds a bachelor's degree in computer science and mathematics with a biology option from the University of Aix-Marseille (2011) and a master’s in Proteomics and Bioinformatics from the University of Geneva (2013).
She has been a web developer in the Vital-IT group at SIB since 2014. Her work spans data visualisation, data management, databases, and web applications, contributing to projects such as SourceData – an EMBO initiative to make research papers discoverable based on data content – and OncoBench, a cancer diagnostics platform for Geneva University Hospitals (HUG).
