September 30, 2022

Welcome to NEAR Basile Rommes!

On September 15, Basile Rommes joined NEAR as a Software Developer. We took the opportunity to ask a few questions to get to know him a little better.

You are new to the team at NEAR. Tell us, who are you?
I am originally from Luxembourg, I have a Master of Bioinformatics from the University of Copenhagen and joined NEAR as a Software Developer. My interests include data wrangling, statistics, and website development. I also like teaching.

What will you do at NEAR?
As a Software Developer I will be involved in the development and maintenance of NEAR platform but also make clean metadata of the NEAR database and harmonize data. Scientists inside and outside of KI will work with me in the early stages of their project so they get the data they need. A big part of that involves harmonizing data coming from different cohorts, different waves within a cohort or different databases. By harmonization we understand the “translation” of a group of variables that describe the same thing into a uniform code such that it is usable for further analysis.

What did you do before you came here?
I was working for the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB), a biomedical research center. The group I was working with enabled the researchers to efficiently manage, analyze and interpret their data, so my tasks were quite similar to those at Karolinska Institutet. Now being here, seeing different solutions to the same problem have been very educational for me, and I plan to translate the methods and knowledge gained in data management to the challenges we face at Karolinska Institutet.

What do you do when you go home? In your spare time?
I enjoy doing sports, right now, especially bouldering/climbing which has risen much in popularity in recent years. I also love going out into nature and can’t wait to hike in the Tyresta nationalpark near Stockholm. Having freshly arrived in Sweden, I of course I also do a lot of tourism on my weekends, exploring the local Parks, Museums and Restaurants.

Once again, we are very happy to welcome you to our team at NEAR and are convinced that you will contribute a lot of knowledge that will contribute to the development of NEAR.