About – BioLizard

Originating from Ghent, Belgium, a growing hub for European biotechnology, we are a bioinformatics and AI company that provides innovative solutions for all your scientific data needs.

The concept of an agile bioinformatics consulting company was initially conceived by three trailblazers in the bioinformatics world. Wim Van Criekinge, a professor in computational biology in University of Ghent, Gerben Menschaert, the faculty member of the same university, and Jan Van den Berghe, an entrepreneur and a close friend of Wim.

They realised that there are so many unanswered questions in the biological world, and genuinely believe that using the right tools such as bioinformatics, biostatistics, machine learning, and AI, many of these problems can be solved. This led to the birth of BioLizard, a team of experienced bioengineers and computer science experts highly skilled in a full range of bioinformatics areas.

The industry is becoming extremely data-driven, and the integration of heterogeneous data in a dynamic environment is becoming central to success. At BioLizard we provide services tailored to our clients needs.

The name BioLizard originates from the fact that lizards are very agile and able to adapt to new environments, which adequately reflects the concept of our company. For this reason, we call our consultants, Lizards.

We provide services globally and collaborate with many organisations across the world.

What we do

Jan Van den Berghe

Co-founder

Jan Van den Berghe is a serial entrepreneur in the food and biotech industry, co-founding the Novalis biotech incubation together with Wim Van Criekinge. Following his education in bio-engineering and Master in General Management, he worked as a senior Independent Strategy Consultant for the Boston Consulting Group. He obtained an MBA from INSEAD after which he co-founded and served as director for several successful biotech startups that have been acquired by leading healthcare and life science companies. He is co-owner and director of Lipa Holding, a family business in food and recycling, and is operating partner in Victus participations, an independent agri and food growth investment fund.
Liesbeth Ceelen

Director of business development

Dr. Liesbeth Ceelen has experience in a multinational environment (J&J) as well as in start-up and scale-up companies. Over the last 15 years, she gained expertise in operational and quality management, and most of all in sales and business development. Her key assets in this field are service selling, solution selling and scientific business development. Her role as director of business development involves pursuing strategic opportunities with clients, steering the BioLizard team and overseeing operations management.
Christian Rausch

Scientific lead & principle Bioinformatics Scientist

Dr. Christian Rausch has several years of experience in the industry (NEB, DSM) and academia (Universität Tübingen, TU München, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Medical Center, Netherlands Cancer Institute). His main knowledge in bioinformatics is in the analysis of molecular sequences (DNA, RNA, protein), and structures (Synthetic biology, Protein Engineering) using advanced statistical and computational algorithms. As principle bioinformatics scientist, he heads the scientific team at BioLizard.
Wim Van Criekinge

Co-founder & scientific advisor

Prof. Wim Van Criekinge, together with Jan, is a co-founder of the Novalis Biotech Incubation. He is a tenured professor at the University of Gent, with nearly 200 peer-reviewed international publications to his name. He founded and heads the laboratory for computational genomics and bioinformatics (BIOBIX) as well as the core sequencing facility (NXTGNT) with global collaborative reach across applied bioscience and clinical discovery. He is a co-founder of BioLizard and he leads the scientific development of the company as well as coaching the consultants. His main interest is the use of machine learning in computational biology and bioinformatics.
Gerben Menschaert

Co-founder & Scientific advisor

Prof. Gerben Menschaert is a co-founder of BioLizard and is an expert in bioinformatics, databases, and AI/Machine learning. He has worked for several years in both pharmaceutical and biotech companies (Janssen Pharmaceutica & deVGen) as a bioinformatician. His main focus is to combine different high throughput technologies and to integrate resulting information using bioinformatics tools to address different biological questions. At Biolizard, he provides expert advice for the bioinformatics team.