Sander Timmer
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Sander Timmer Senior Director of AI/ML & Decision Sciences at GSK | Ex-Microsoft | Data Science | Genomics | PhD in Big Data Biology | Entrepreneur | University of Cambridge alumni
My Projects

My Projects

Microsoft blog posts

For my work as Lead Data Scientist, I have written the following public blog posts on my team’s blog. Related code can be found on my public Github repo.

  • Evaluating Machine Learning models when dealing with imbalanced classes
  • Using Azure Machine Learning Notebook for quality control of automated predictive pipelines
  • Using Microsoft Azure Blob Storage from within Python

PhD thesis

  • Understanding the epigenome using system genetics

PhD publications

  • Quantitative Genetics of CTCF Binding Reveal Local Sequence Effects and Different Modes of X-Chromosome Association

PhD projects

  • Identification and characterisation of genetic components responsible for chromatin quantitative traits
  • Genetic Association on Human skeleton features obtained from MRI scans
  • Using DNA barcoding to genetically identify inbred Drosophila lines
  • De-novo sequence assembly of high coverage genomes

Master projects

  • Evolutionary indel constraints in intronic regions studied within the 1000 Genomes Project

Bachelor projects

  • The influence of protein dynamics on structural alignments
  • Peritonitis in CAPD patients – a proteomics analysis
  • THINGS – a text-mining application

Recent Posts

  • Databricks Data & AI summit speaker
  • Deep Dive: Quantum Computing Breakthrough
  • Edge Vision and MLops: Revolutionizing Real-Time Visual Data Processing for Edge AI
  • “Revolutionizing Industries: The Powerful Combination of Digital Twins and Machine Learning”
  • Generative AI: Revolutionizing Digital Twins

About me

Sander Timmer, PhD is leading GSK Vaccines’ strategic efforts on utilizing data and AI to create the healthcare of tomorrow. I have over 10 years of Data Science experience from writing neural nets to leading teams of data scientists and data engineers delivering production AI systems.

Before GSK, I was a Healthcare Industry Solutions Manager at Microsoft in the Global Health and Life Sciences team. My focus was on applying AI to drive new solutions and experiences at Microsoft's strategic Pharma and Public health accounts. I obtained my PhD at the University of Cambridge specialising in Big Data Biology while being based at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL).

In my previous "academic life", I was working in Ewan Birney's research group. My main subject was understanding non-coding variation using genome-wide molecular assays, like FAIRE and CTCF, onto Human cell line populations. Another research interest was the identification of whole-body phenotypes in Human MRI scans using Machine Learning techniques.

Furthermore, I'm the co-founder of Rijschoolvergelijker. The largest driving school comparison website in the Netherlands with European ambitions.

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