Rutger Vos studied biology at the University of Amsterdam, where he graduated in 2000. He then embarked on his PhD research under professor Arne Mooers at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, where he defended his thesis on phyloinformatic problems in 2006. As a self-taught programmer he then became involved in several open-source scientific software development projects while continuing his research career through a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada) and a Marie Curie research fellowship at the University of Reading (Reading, UK). In Spring of 2012 he commenced his employment as the bioinformaticist of the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in a role where he combines novel research with bioinformatics contributions to various research programmes within the organization. In his spare time he also contributes to various open source software projects (TreeBASE, Bio::Phylo, NeXML) and is co-PI of the PhyloTastic project. In addition Rutger has taught bioinformatics workshops in the US, Japan, China, Kenya and three times before at GTPB courses PHYLOINF09, ARANGS12, ARANGS13, ARANGS15

Affiliation: Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden, the Netherlands

Pedro Fernandes graduated in Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering at IST (Universidade de Lisboa). He worked in Biomedical Engineering, Biophysics and Physiology and changed to Bioinformatics in 1990. He established the first user community in Portugal around the national service provided by the portuguese node of the EMBnet. In 1998 he created the Gulbenkian Training Programme in Bioinformatics, GTPB that has provided a wide variety of user and developer skills to a total of more than 5000 course attendees throughout its eighteen years of existance. The provision of training in a coherent programme, with established training methods and a structured approach to meeting the evolving needs of the community, resulted in a standalone, reproducible and sustainable operation [Fernandes P L The GTPB training programme in Portugal Brief Bioinform (2010) 11 (6): 626-634. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/bib/bbq063]. He currently teaches Bioinformatics both in graduate and undergraduate programmes. He is the Training Coordinator of Elixir Portugal and leads the Train-the-Researcher sub-task of the ELIXIR/EXECELERATE, a H2020 program to accelerate the start of the ELIXIR infrastructure provision initiative for biomedical data and bioinformatics tools. He is one of the founders of GOBLET, the Global Organisation for Bioinformatics Education and Training, where he currently chairs the Learning, Education and Training Committee. Pedro is an ivited researcher at the University of Porto, Faculty of Medicine, and a consultant/instructor with H3ABioNet for the distance learning courses IBT and AGMT.

Affiliation: Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência , Oeiras, Portugal