Yves Van de Peer is Professor in Bioinformatics and Genome Biology at Ghent University and VIB group leader in the Department of Plant Systems Biology. Currently, he is leading the Bioinformatics and Systems Biology division; a group of about 35 bioinformaticians with backgrounds in biology, computer science, physics, and mathematics. His research group is a center of excellence in the fields of gene and genome annotation, comparative (evolutionary) genomics, and (top-down) systems biology.