Dr. Christopher Field
Dr. Christopher Field
Lecturer at the Department of Biology
Additional information
- 2018-current: Institute Bioinformatician for the Inst. of Microbiology, Dept. of Biology, ETH Zürich
- 2011-2017: Postdoc in the van Nimwegen research group, Biozentrum, University of Basel
- 2010-2011: Postdoc in the Summers research group, Dept. of Genetics, University of Cambridge
- 2006-2010: PhD in the Summers research group, Dept. of Genetics, University of Cambridge
- 2002-2006: BA (MA), MEng in Engineering (instrumentation and control), University of Cambridge
Additional information
My responsibilities are in three main areas:
- Empowering researchers and students in bioinformatics through teaching and advice
- Supporting IMB research groups with bioinformatic analyses of their data
- Developing and maintaining computational infrastructure and platforms for data stewardship
Empowering researchers and students in bioinformatics
I teach regular courses to enable IMB members to work in linux on our computer server, to use bioinformatic tools for sequence data and to program in R for data analysis. I am also a lecturer in the Department of Biology for the second year course "Practical Training in Bioinformatics" and provide teaching and computational support for the third year concept course "Bioinformatics".
I also maintain our teaching server, Cousteau, which provides a linux platform, R-studio and Jupyter servers and has its own software stack for bioinformatic tools.
Supporting IMB research groups
I provide a range of support for bioinformatics and data analysis. This ranges from running data through pipelines we have developed (for example: 16S analysis, genome and metagenome assembly), to software development for a particular type of analysis (for example: an R package for synthetic community 16S data, a python package for image analysis of colonies growing on plates), to exploratory analysis of sequence data or results. I can also offer advice on statistical analysis, programming, experimental design and more.
In addition, I oversee Oxford Nanopore sequencing within the Sunagawa group and stay up-to-date with developments in that area.
Developing and maintaining computational infrastructure
I am responsible for ensuring that the institute server Morgan is operational, along with the job scheduling system and our main software stack. I developed and maintain our long-term sequence storage server based on OpenBIS, Harvest, and am developing its capabilities to soon support storage of microscopy image data. I also try to advise on good data stewardship within the IMB and am part of the ETH Data Stewardship Network.
Research interests
I maintain an interest in the evolution of bacteria and mobile genetic elements. Despite recent developments in AI, I also strongly believe that well-rounded mathematical and computational skills will only become more important in the field of biology, so I support the continued 'digitisation' of the subject.