Dirk Valkenborg received his M.Sc. degree in Electrotechnical Engineering from the K.U.Leuven in 2004. He received his Ph.D. degree in Mathematics and Statistical Bioinformatics from the University of Hasselt in 2008 and obtained an M.Sc. degree in Biostatistics in 2009 from the same institution. Currently, he is active as a professor in bioinformatics and data sciences at the Center for Statistics and the Data Science Institute at Hasselt University, where he leads a team with focus on computational methodologies for the low-level interpretation of omics-related data and machine learning.