Alice Carolyn McHardy obtained her Ph.D. in bioinformatics from Bielefeld University in 2004. From 2005 to 2007, she was a postdoc and then permanent staff member in the Bioinformatics and Pattern Discovery Group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, USA. She then founded the independent research group for “Computational Genomics and Epidemiology”