My name is Jip de Kok, I am a master graduate of the Systems Biology master at Maastricht University. Prior to my master's I completed my bachelor at the Maastricht Science Programme, resulting in a degree of Bachelor of Science in Liberal Arts and Sciences. During my academic career I focussed on programming and applying that skillset to a multitude of biological problems. I have always been interested in the life sciences, particularly the complex systems within the human body fascinate me due to the heterogeneous interplay between the different layers, be it genetics, metabolomics, or even at the organ level, the connection between the different systems is complex, and incomprehensible without the proper modelling tools. During my studies I have come to realise that what I enjoy most, is the programming part. Automating statistical analysis pipelines to test hypotheses, or formulate new ones is one of such applications. Moreover, I have grown very fond of the concepts of Machine Learning (ML) and am convinced of its potential for the future given the continuous development of data collection and processing hardware. My knowledge lies predominantly in the supervised area of ML, where we predict/classify certain outcomes based on labelled training data. I also applied such techniques in my master thesis where I evaluated the performance of many ML models on the prediction task of atopy using infant gut microbiome data.