Dr. Vidal Fey recruited as staff scientist to support health data science research and infrastructure development

With the Academy of Finland funding for Tampere University’s strategic profiling in health data science, Dr. Vidal Fey has been recruited as staff scientist at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Technology (MET). The aim of this new role is to support the development of data analysis and management infrastructure required for health data science, especially in utilization of large scale genome data. In addition, the role involves supporting research and carrying out scientific work. Read what Vidal tells about his background and interests for the position.

 

“I would describe myself as a classic bioinformatician, a term that, in my opinion, describes the where and how of my professional development best and explains the steps I have taken in the now 16 years of my career as data scientist.

In short, my scientific background is in biology with a specialization in plant physiology. I studied and earned my Ph.D. at the University of Jena in Germany. After moving to Finland for personal reasons, I started to work as a data analyst in the bioinformatics core unit at the Center for Biotechnology (BTK) in Turku. The group soon adopted the language for scientific computing, R, for data analysis, a move decisive for my path to become a bioinformatician.

In the following years, I worked as bioinformatician for VTT, the University of Turku, a private company Genevia Technologies and, until recently, Tampere University. My posts have involved tasks ranging from analysis of biomedical data to server administration and tools development. My responsibilities have also comprised procurement of hardware, building and administrating a small High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster, as well as monitoring storage and computing performance.

I am excited to apply my previous expertise in my new role as Staff Scientist. With regards to computational biology research, I will be the point of contact for genomic data analysis matters including data availability, data sources, computational resources, and tools to support the effective use of available data sets from international efforts, as well as of large-scale computing environments. Concerning the development of computational tools and infrastructure, I will support the implementation of pipelines for standard analysis tasks, data management, patient-centered repositories, and data exchange between Tampere University Hospital and university resources.”

 

Vidal Fey, PhD, Staff Scientist

Faculty of Medicine and Health Technology, Tampere University

 

Health data science is a strategic profiling area of Tampere University that brings together domain experts on data science and health research across Faculties and Tampere University Hospital. Health Data Science involves advanced analytics of biological, clinical, and health care data.