Thomas Litman

Thomas Litman

Professor

Member of:

    Hi there! So, you'd like to know who I am? Well, I am an explorer.
    That is: I like to travel through the data jungle, which is a wild, wonderful and fascinating place! 
    But sometimes you can't see the jungle for all the trees.
    Which is why we need some filtering (removing the noise from the signal), sorting (applying a little statistics, just remember that relevance is more important than significance :-), and visualization (if what you see is what you get, then if you don't see it you don't get it).
    This is necessary to turn the data into information, and eventually: useful knowledge.
    Which is the purpose of bioinformatics (which is what I do).
    Bioinformatics is a tool (or rather: a whole toolbox) for analysis of large data, such as those generated by the -omics technologies, of which I will mention just a few:
    Genomics (DNA), transcriptomics (mRNA), proteomics (proteins), epigenomics (e.g. DNA methylation, histone modification, and the whole world of non-protein coding RNA), metabolomics (including lipidomics), glycomics, microbiomics (bacteria in your gut, airways and skin), interactomics, and integromics (putting it all together in a more or less holistic view).

    Wanna come along and enter the jungle?

    Primary fields of research

    • Medical bioinformatics
    • Inflammatory skin diseases (atopic dermatitis, psoriasis, CTCL, other)
    • Multidrug resistance (in cancer)
    • Transcriptomics (microarray and NGS, mainly RNA-seq)
    • Metabolomics (including lipidomics)
    • Microbiome analysis (gut, skin)
    • Proteomics (MS)
    • "Skinomics"
    • Multi-omics (integrative analysis)
    • MicroRNA biology
    • Molecular biomarkers
    • MDR (P-glycoprotein)
    • MXR (ABCG2, BCRP)
    • Data visualization

    Current research

    Applied bioinformatics, applying most of the -omics methods mentioned above, but also structural bioinformatics and translational research (cellular models, 3-D models, in vivo models, clinical data).

    Inflammatory skin diseases, in particular characterizing the endotypes of atopic dermatitis, looking for biomarkers of diagnostic, prognostic, and predictive value.

     

    Teaching

    Whenever I have the chance, I like to teach applied bioinformatics, so pop by for a free guided tour through the data jungle .-)

    I am happy to supervise bachelor, masters and PhD students.

    Possible conflicts of interest

    I am funded by LEO Pharma.

    ID: 33298538