Research interests
My research activities are dedicated to the conception, implementation, evaluation and application of bioinformatics approaches to analyse genome regulation and biomolecular networks. Since 1997, I lead the Regulatory Sequence Analysis Tools (RSAT, http://rsat.eu/), a software suite for the detection of regulatory elements in non-coding DNA sequences. I also developed bioinformatics approaches relying on graph theory (path finding, subgraph extraction), to infer metabolic pathways from sets of functionally related genes (operons, co-expression clusters, phylogenetic profiles, ...). My current research focuses on integrative approaches to genomic regulation based on multi-omics data.
Since 2017, I am Deputy Director of the Institut Français de Bioinformatique (IFB; https://www.france-bioinformatique.fr/), a national infrastructure federating 21 bioinformatics platforms and 15 associated teams to support research in life sciences. IFB activities include the deployment of compute and storage facilities, software development and packaging, development of standards and ontologies, promotion of open science, training, consulting and support to biologist for their data analysis. The IFB is also the French node of the European bioinformatics infrastructure ELIXIR (https://elixir-europe.org/).
An important part of my activities are dedicated to teaching and training various domains of bioinformatics and life sciences: fundamentals of bioinformatics, biostatistics, genomics, analysis of regulatory sequences, analysis of biomolecular networks, evolutionary biology, science & society, integrative bioinformatics, good practices for reproducible sciences.
For more information : Jacques van Helden (0000-0002-8799-8584) - ORCID
