Raïssa de Boer

I am an evolutionary biologist with a particular interest in sexual selection, animal behaviour and inbreeding. During my BSc and MSc studies I worked on various topics and species including visual communication in marmoset monkeys (Utrecht University, the Netherlands) and sexual selection in guppies (University of Antwerp, Belgium). During my PhD studies (University of Antwerp, Belgium) I focused on inbreeding depression in canaries, and in particular I was interested to see how inbreeding affected sexually selected traits. I joined the lab of John Fitzpatrick in 2018 as a post-doctoral researcher, with my main focus on inbreeding avoidance in a variety of fish species.

In my current position I carry out research on a rare disease called ANCA-associated vasculitis. I study environmental factors and how this may affect the risk of getting this disease, for example a lack of vitamin D or smoking. In addition, I am part of an international project ("FAIRVASC") that aims to combine patient registries from different countries to address the problem of having too little data typical for rare diseases. Within this project, I apply semantic web technologies by uplifting data to RDF using R2RML. After anonymising data, it will be accessible through a local triplestore via SPARQL interfaces.