Biography

Angelika Merkel is a seasoned bioinformatician with a molecular biology background and more than 15 years working with Omics data. She received her initial training as a molecular biologist at the University of Constance (Germany) between 2000-2003. From 2004-2009, she studied at the University of Canterbury (New Zealand) where she received a degree in Molecular Ecology and completed her PhD in Biology. During her Ph.D., working on the evolution of short repetitive DNA sequences in yeast, she transitioned from wet to dry lab' research having acquired programming skills through specialized training and self-teaching.

Since 2010, Angelika has been mainly based in Barcelona, working on several large high-data volume projects including the ENCODE and BLUEPRINT projects that have provided the foundations for transcriptome and epigenome analysis in human and specifically hematopoiesis and its associated malignancies. While working on the ENCODE project at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG, Barcelona) under Roderic Guigo, she was involved in the development of the RNA-seq analysis pipeline and the characterization of cell-type specific transcription and alternative splicing which led to the notion that as much 75% of the human genome is actually transcribed (on average 57% in a given cell type). Later, working at the National Center for Genomic Analysis (CNAG) under Simon Heath, she was involved in the development of an analysis pipeline for Bisulfite Sequencing to study DNA methylation during health and disease. Her involvement in the analysis of normal and malignant blood cell differentiation (as part of BLUEPRINT) led to the discovery that the drastic loss of methylation previously observed in some cancers are, in fact, derived from healthy differentiation signatures in lymphocytes.

Since 2020, she heads the Bioinformatics Core facility at the IJC. Her research interest is the epigenomic regulation of gene expression during health and disease, particularly cancer. Her passion is to develop bioinformatic tools and methods for biomedical research. She is an expert in bioinformatic workflows, data management and biomarker discovery.

ORCHID ID: 0000-0001-5164-6803