Starting a blog

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hi there! This is my first post in hopefully many. I'm Pascal and work as a bioinformatician in the field of metabolomics. I studied bioinformatics, getting my master degree in 2020 at the University of Amsterdam and since then I work at the Metabolomics Analytical Centre, which is part of the University of Leiden. Here I develop software to support the data analysis of large volumes of samples. This however, remains a challenge for reasons that hopefully become clear through posts on this blog. Ofcourse, I will also attempt to provide solutions for practical challenges I've encounted.

I decided to start this blog to share my experience with data analysis in metabolomics as publishing articles is a slow process, and might not be the right platform for sharing everyday encounters. I've been enjoying reading other blogs like yet another metabolomics club & Notes from a data witch, and it seemed the right fit to share my thoughts, ideas and code snippets. I'll post those to my git. Expect to see code mostly written in R, Python and perhaps some C++.

In the office I'm known for drinking way too much coffee (although I don't see anything wrong with my consumption..). For this reason I called the light/dark mode after coffee drinks and themed the blog as such. I'm genuinely curious how big the caffeine spike would be on our LC-MS systems, but since the assay uses plasma it will remain a mystery to this day. Perhaps DBS based metabolomics would be my best bet..

Anyways, enjoy your stay!

Pascal Maas

Starting a blog