Maria Anisimova is Professor of Computational Genomics, Head of Bioinformatics center at the Institute of Computational Life Sciences ZHAW and research group leader at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics.  She received her PhD in 2001 from University College London (UCL), United Kingdom. Her research group develops methods for analysing genomic sequences, including modelling the molecular evolution and adaptive change. Most recently her group focused on modelling the evolution of insertions, deletions and tandem repeats in genomic sequences, as well as using semantic web technologies for literature-based discovery in biomedical sciences.

Tugce Bilgin is an evolutionary biology researcher and lecturer. Before joining ZHAW, she was a lecturer at Columbia University in New York, USA. She holds a PhD in computational evolutionary biology from the University of Zurich and worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Switzerland for four years before moving to the US in 2018 to focus on teaching. Since then, Tugce has been teaching courses in bioinformatics, biostatistics, and data analysis. She also teaches creative coding for art in museums and yoga at a refugee center.

Tugce is the founder and co-chair of the annually organized Evolutionary Genomics Summer School, a one-week workshop that has hosted more than 250 students over the past 10 years. She is passionate about making science more accessible to students and advancing pedagogical research. Tugce is part of the diversity group at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and co-chair of the IDEA Taskforce at SMBE.

Feifei Xia is a third-year PhD student in professor Anisimova’s lab. She received her Master degree in data science from the University of Zurich in 2021 and worked as an intern at Empa St. Gallen for half a year before she joined the applied computational genomic group. Her research focuses on refining cancer classification and understanding cancer evolution with short tandem repeat variations in colorectal cancer. She built a dashboard to visualize and analyze the associations between short tandem repeat variations and gene expression data across different cancer subtypes.

Max Verbiest defended his thesis in the fall of 2024 in Maria Anisimova’s group and now works as a postdoctoral researcher. He studied biomedical sciences at the University of Amsterdam and holds a joint MSc degree in bioinformatics and systems biology from the University of Amsterdam and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Max joined Professor Anisimova's lab in 2020 as a PhD student. In his research, he investigates how variations in short tandem repeats—a specific type of repetitive genetic element—influence colorectal cancer. To achieve this, he integrates DNA and gene expression data to determine the functional effects of short tandem repeat mutations. This research can be combined with clinical patient information to link mutations to specific cancer phenotypes.