Wim is associate professor at the VUB in Brussels, Belgium, and closely associated with the (IB)2 VUB/ULB Interuniversity Institute of Bioinformatics in Brussels, of which he is a former director. He leads the Bio2Byte group, with research focusing on the prediction of the biophysical characteristics of proteins from their amino acid sequence. These are then applied to protein design for synthetic biology and to elucidate the molecular causes for human diseases.
He started in (organic) chemistry at the University of Gent, Belgium, for his Ph.D. studied HIV V3 loop peptides from experimental Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) data, and continued with the NMR analysis of peptides and proteins at McGill university and the Biotechnology Research Institute (BRI) in Montréal, Canada. During an in-between year at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium, he rediscovered programming, and started to move solidly into computational aspects of NMR. This was the core of his work while at the Protein Data Bank Europe (PDBe) at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) at Hinxton, Cambridge, UK, prior to moving to the VUB.