My name is Daniel Fischer and I am living and working in Finland. I am a Senior Researcher at the Luonnonvarakeskus / Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke) for Bioinformatics and Biostatistics. I was born in Dinslaken, Germany, and studied Statistics and Computer Sciences at the Technical University Dortmund, Germany. Since 2009 I am living in Finland, where I also did my PhD in Biostatistics.

During my Luke time, I feel like I’ve morphed into a Swiss army knife of Bioinformatics, having worked on a variety of applications like RNA-seq, variant calling, GBS analysis, metagenomics, lncRNA prediction, miRNAs, etc., mainly for my colleagues from the animal genomics side, but recently also opening into other, interesting fields.

While my Bioinformatics work is the bread and butter to my professional life, other tasks at Luke are the slices of cucumber on top of it. Back in 2020, I had the privilege to serve as the founding chair of the Luke Early Career Community and continued to contribute as a co-chair for some time before I ‘retired’ from the post. During that period, I discovered the joy and fulfillment that comes from voluntary work in a community. The EC (and also EC’s sister community, the Intracultural (IC)) community has hopefully brought something good to many at Luke, and being a part of it and contributing, even if just a little, fills me with joy. Seeing the appreciation from decision-makers towards these communities, it feels great to put in some effort and contribution to a community and pass on that appreciationto others.

I also coordinate the Bioinformatics Method Support Network, a network of Bioinformaticians at Luke aimed at peer-to-peer support and providing training, support, and advice to Luke researchers in need. We recently had our Network kick-off meeting, and I’d like to believe it was a success. We brainstormed some brilliant ideas and are hopeful that we’ll be up and running better in the near future. So, if you’re into Bioinformatics, stay tuned for more exciting stuff!