Prof. Alan Christoffels

Prof. Alan Christoffels, UWC, Director: SANBI

Professor Alan Christoffels is the director of the South African National Bioinformatics Institute and director of the Medical Research Council Bioinformatics Capacity Development Research Unit. In 2009, he became the NRF Research Chair in Bioinformatics and Public Health Genomics.  His bioinformatics laboratory studies host-pathogen interactions with a view to understand the regulatory networks that control immune responses to pathogen challenge. Machine learning approaches are being implemented in an attempt to identify novel protein-protein interactions that can be tested experimentally. These studies are complemented by next generation sequencing data that allows us to get a glimpse of the host and pathogenic genes that are triggered during an infection. In this regard, he has been developing methods to analyze this rich source of genomic and transcriptomic data.