David Barnett (D.J.M.)

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David Barnett is a staff researcher (bioinformatics/biostatistics) supporting the microbiome research group of Prof. John Penders. 

David uses advanced computational methods to study how the human microbiome contributes to health and disease, and how it can be affected by diet and medications. He develops bioinformatic workflows to extract information from terabytes of metagenomic sequence data and uses biostatistical techniques to make sense of this information in the context of human cohorts and clinical trials.

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Besides research, David is an experienced educator. He has broad experience teaching on in various Maastricht University courses related to biomedical data, and he has delivered numerous workshops on microbiome data science at the UM and external events.

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David studied Biomedical Sciences at Sussex University in England, followed by Health Science Research with Epidemiology specialisation at Maastricht University. He completed a PhD (2018-2024) split between the Maastricht Center for Systems Biology and the MUMC+ Medical Microbiology department, supervised by Prof. Ilja Arts and Prof. John Penders. His PhD thesis is titled “Perturbing and Protecting the Infant Gut: exploring the impacts of antibiotics and oligosaccharides on the gut microbiota and child health”. His work included biostatistical analysis of data from birth cohorts and experimental models, and the development of microViz, the popular R package for microbiome data analysis.