Laura Dijkhuizen

Data analysis professional and educator specialised in plant genomics

Data & analytics educator specialising on young professionals and plant biology specialist with a predisposition for symbioses

Welcome again to my portfolio page! I’m Laura, passionate about plant biology and making complex science accessible. I bring a strong background in plant biology, bioinformatics, and team coordination. Colleagues find me a skilled communicator and experienced stakeholder manager. I thrive in autonomous, mission driven teams.

Education & Employment

  • Lecturer and Trainer at Utrecht University
  • PhD Researcher and junior teacher at Utrecht University
  • MSc 2017 Environmental Biology at Utrecht University
  • BSc 2014 Biological Sciences at Utrecht University
  • BSc discontinued Applied Physics at Twente University

Professional Highlights

  • Data & Analytics Leadership: Designed and delivered 50+ bioinformatics & data‐science workshops for PhD candidates & postdocs, training over 500 researchers in R, Python & Bash.
  • Reproducible Workflow Architect: Built and maintained production‐quality pipelines on metagenome analysis, phylogeny inference and Nanopore variant calling for use in our lab.
  • Governance & Policy Impact: Chaired the Graduate School PhD Council (~2000 members), negotiated new graduation guidelines with deans and HR departments of all three life sciences faculties.
  • R&D Reporting & Automation: Automated dashboard & report generation via GitHub Actions and Docker–SLURM HPC.
  • Domain Expertise: Specialist in plant–microbe symbiosis genomics.

Hobbies

Being a plant biologist, also means to have green fingers!

One of my hobbies I’d like to showcase here, is photography. I usually photograph the city of Utrecht, just because it’s so photogenic and well, I live here! Find out more on Instagram or go to my photography page via the button below. Additionally, I like shooting landscapes and macros of plants. Most of the photos here are made by myself, and most photo’s of me are made by my lovely girlfriend with whom I share this fun hobby. Some example pictures are available here:

photography

Besides photography, you can find my climbing or bouldering every week and in the summer I love sailing on the family’s traditional Dutch sailing boat. Some weekend, it’s good to take it easy, in which case you can find me in our lovely garden tending to the plants.

CV

More details, download my Latest CV or have a look at the source code on GitHub.