We are pleased to announce the establishment of a new Bioinformatics Laboratory operating within the National BioImaging Center BioPixel, at the Nencki Institute campus in Mikołajki, under the leadership of Dr. Miron Kursa.

The new laboratory will carry out typical bioinformatic analyses as well as application of advanced scientific data analysis methods, in particular utilising machine learning approaches.

As part of the Laboratory’s activities, the Biopixel computational cluster is planned to be expanded with an unified data exchange plane, allowing one to perform analyses and computations in a more efficient, automatic and reproducible manner. This development will streamline the experiment-analysis pipeline and simplify adoption of best practices of open science.

The Laboratory will also organize training sessions, tutorials, and offer individual consultations and development of custom analytical and computational solutions.

Miron Kursa holds MSc in physics and PhD in computer science. He is a laureate of MNiSW and FNP START stipends, and has been listed among the “Top 2% Scientists” since 2020. 

His scientific pursuits revolve around knowledge discovery methods and statistical modelling of complex systems. He has substantial experience with big data analysis and high performance computing systems, and is the author of scientific software, most notably the Boruta method. 

He has carried out projects across a wide range of disciplines, including processing and analyses of omics and general biomedical data. He has also developed decision support solutions for aviation, agriculture and energy engineering, and served as an advisor for start-ups.

Previously, Dr. Kursa collaborated with the Nencki Institute on projects related to modelling the mechanisms behind the reward system and analysing ultrasonic vocalisations.