F. Caiment
Dr. Florian Caiment, born on August 15, 1980, in Troyes, France, is a specialist in toxicogenomics and bioinformatics. For his PhD in the University of Liège (Belgium) under the supervision of Professor Michel Georges, Florian investigated in a wet-lab setting, the callipyge phenotype in sheep—a unique case of muscular hypertrophy governed by polar overdominance. His thesis, "Contribution to the Knowledge of Polar Overdominance in Sheep Callipyge Locus," covered epigenetics, genomic imprinting, and microRNA analysis, incorporating high-throughput sequencing to extend his expertise in bioinformatics.
In April 2011, Florian joined Maastricht University’s Department of Toxicogenomics as a postdoctoral fellow, contributing to the ASAT knowledge base project and the European DiXa project (Data Infrastructure for Alternatives to Animal-Based Chemical Safety Testing). Since then, his focus has been on next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies, enabling comprehensive genome and transcriptome analyses. He led RNA-Seq activities for the EU FP7 HeCaToS project and the Horizon 2020 Eu-ToxRisk project and played a key role in international collaborations such as the MAQC consortium and the OECD initiative to develop a transcriptomics reference analysis framework for regulatory agencies.
Currently, Florian is the omics working group chair of the ASPIS EU cluster project and Vice-Chair of the Board of Examiners for the Biomedical Sciences and Regenerative Medicine program. As part of the GROW research institute’s management team, he serves as Program Leader of the Prevention program, overseeing the infrastructure portfolio. His research now focuses on developing alternative to animal testing predicting toxicological outcomes using omics data and machine learning methods. He is committed to advancing these approaches for application in regulatory frameworks, promoting innovative, animal-free methods for chemical safety assessment.