One Health PACT / Avans – Lab-student: Manon Cortooms
Three Biology and Laboratorial Research students from Avans are working for the next six months on OHPACT-related projects under the supervision of teachers with OHPACT as their client in the minor bio-informatics. Within this part of the curriculum of the bachelor education, project based learning is essential.
One of this students is Manon Cortooms
Who am I?
My name is Manon Cortooms I am 20 years old and live in Breda. I am currently in year three of the study biomedical research at Avans. Last semester I followed the biotechnology specialization and this semester I applied for the minor bioinformatics. In my spare time I love to travel, go hiking, paint or spend time with my friends and family(dogs included).
What subject will I be focussing on this semester? What will I be researching?
During this minor I am working on the determination of tick species in the Netherlands. Our goal is to create a pipeline using a bioinformatics tool called Snakemake which can help us analyze our data that was obtained from Nanopore sequencing. Using this tool we will determine the vector species of the ticks.
What do I want to do with this in the future?
I think having a skill in bioinformatics is really valuable in the future. You can actually obtain the data by doing the labwork but you can also analyze the data you obtained yourself. I am a very independent person who likes to do things myself so this will come in handy in the future.
What would I like to learn?
Currently, I am struggling with working on computers in general. I am hoping that by following this minor I get a little more skilled at this. But we’ll see how that goes for me.