My name is Natalia Zajac, I am a postdoc at the Max Planck for Evolutionary Biology. Currently I am working in the team of Nathalie Feiner on constructing a pangenome for lizards from the Podarcis genus. See https://feiner-uller-group.se/ for more info.

Previously, for 3 years and 4 months, I worked as a bioinformatics scientist at the Functional Genomics Center Zurich, a core facility shared between ETH Zurich and University of Zurich. I performed data analysis for research projects in the topics of population genomics, biodiversity genomics, experimental evolution and medical genomics. I specialized on long read sequencing (mostly PacBio but also Oxford Nanopore), bulk RNA sequencing, pooled sequencing (Pool-seq), 16S rRNA sequencing and shotgun metagenomics/metatranscriptomics. On top of that, we published two internal studies elucidating how technical sequencing decisions can influence biological conclusions: a comparison between short-read and long-read scRNA sequencing and RNA sequencing performed on different input amount and amplified with different amount of PCR cycles. I have also been a contributor to the ezRun package: https://github.com/uzh/ezRun.
Additionally, I taught metagenomic data analysis, a 3-day course running at FGCZ twice a year.For the program and tutorials see here.
Together with Jonas Grossmann, I taught a Bachelor and Master student block course entitled "Research Cycle in Genomics". We won a micro_innovation grant from UZH for expanding resources for the course in methylation patterns in Staphylococcus aureus evolving in the presence of molecules from Pseudomonas aeruginosa. See here for more information about the course: https://www.news.uzh.ch/de/articles/news/2023/forschungsbasierte-lehre.html

Prior to that during my Phd at ETH and a short postdoc at University of Lausanne I worked on the evolutionary processes shaping the structure and function of the genome of Atriophallophorus winterbourni, a trematode parasite. This repository refers to the following publication https://doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evab010.