Christophe Büschl is an Austrian bioinformatic who has recently arrived to Argentina. He received a grant to work in CIBION (Center for Bionanoscience Research), CONICET, at the Mass Spectrometry Laboratory. After a few days of his arrival, Christophe talked about his impressions about the country, his background and the expectations of researching here.
- Interviewer (I): Hi, Christophe. It’s an honor that you are here. Please, I would like you to introduce yourself.
- Christophe (C) Thanks for having me. I'm a bioinformatician from Austria and I have recently acquired a small grant to come to Argentina to do some research in the field of metabolomics, at Dr. María Eugenia Monge’s laboratory (CIBION - CONICET). Together we will work on developing computational workflows. And apart from that, I like playing tennis, going for a swim and hiking. Here I'm looking forward to exploring Argentinian culture as I have never been to South America. I don't know much about your country yet, but I'm eager to learn and explore, see the countryside and meet the culture and lots of new people.
- When did you arrive here?
- At the beginning of December.
- And what did you study?
- I studied bioinformatics in Austria in the University of Applied Sciences, Hagenberg, in Upper Austria.
- What were you doing in Austria?
- I was a postdoctoral researcher associate at Boku University where I helped as a bioinformatician also in metabolomics research. There our research interest lies in the
metabolic interaction between agricultural plants and microbes.
- Why did you decide to come to Argentina?
- I'm interested in the science that is being carried out. In my recent research I have
mostly been working with LC-MS, but the method of DART-MS and the applications
So it will be a bit challenging to get to know the instruments, their data and
characteristics as well as the applications in this rather short time frame. And apart
from that, I also want to explore South America.
- If you had to think about what you like most about being here, what would it be?
- Oh, that is a tricky question after just two weeks. I like that the Argentinian people are
quite polite and helpful when I was lost in the streets of Buenos Aires in the first few
days.
- And how long will you stay here?
- I will be staying here for five months. My grant started in December and it will officially finish by the end of April.
- And finally, which are your expectations about working here?
- Learning a lot of new things! For example, how to efficiently process the DART-MS
datasets, develop new software tools for processing them, in collaboration with Miss
Monge and her team, so that such datasets can hopefully in the future be also process
not only with vendor tools, but also open source tools that can be integrated into the
platform that is already established here.
