Alice McHardy

Prof. Alice McHardy is the leader of the Computational Biology of Infection Research Lab at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in Braunschweig. Prof. McHardy studied biochemistry from 1995 to 2000 at Bielefeld University. She obtained a PhD in bioinformatics in 2004 and then worked as a postdoc at the Center for Biotechnology at Bielefeld University. From 2005 to 2007 she worked first as a postdoc and then as a permanent staff member in the Bioinformatics and Pattern Discovery Group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, USA. She then became the head of the independent research group for “Computational Genomics and Epidemiology” at the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science in Saarbrücken. In 2010, she was appointed as Chair of Algorithmic Bioinformatics at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf. Since 2014, she leads the Computational Biology of Infection Research Lab in Braunschweig. She is a metagenomic specialist, the direct analysis of DNA from a whole environmental community and her group focuses on high throughput meta’omics, population genomic and single cell sequencing data. They interact with experimental collaborators to verify they findings and to promote their translation into medical treatment or diagnosis procedures. To achieve their research goals, the group also develops novel algorithms and software. Furthermore, Dr. McHardy is one of the contributor and organizer of the Critical Assessment of Metagenome Interpretation (CAMI) challenge, which is a community-led initiative aiming for an independent, comprehensive and bias-free evaluation of metagenomic methods.