About

Hi there ;) I completed my PhD in bioinformatics at the BMI lab at ETH Zurich in early 2025, and am currently a postdoc at KIT in Karlsruhe in the Algorithm Engineering group of Peter Sanders.

My PhD started with work on near-linear algorithms for edit distance (pairwise alignment), and continued with more theoretical work on minimizers. Currently, I mostly focus on algorithm engineering of various (mostly classic) methods in bioinformatics (hpc).

This blog is where I dump my thoughts on my research. It includes numerous short notes/remarks/ideas for research, and a few longer posts, some of which have been turned into papers.

Feel free to use this blog as inspiration and build on the ideas you see here, as long as you cite appropriately.

If you spot mistakes or have suggestions for improvement, comment at the bottom of each page or make an issue on the GitHub source for this blog.

Contact Link to heading

In order of preference:

• Discord, but DM me elsewhere first ;)
• Bsky @curiouscoding.nl
• ragnar.grootkoerkamp@gmail.com
• Twitter @curious_coding

Trivia (i.e. i18n) Link to heading

My first name is Ragnar. My last name is Groot Koerkamp. Yes, that has a space. No, you cannot get away with Groot, and no, you cannot say Koerkamp.

Don’t even try to say Ragnar G. Koerkamp. In fact, my middle name starts with a G, so you’d have to write R. G. Groot Koerkamp, or Groot Koerkamp, R. G.. To not complicate things more than they already are, use one of the following for purposes of publishing and citing:

• R. Groot Koerkamp,
• Ragnar Groot Koerkamp,
• Groot Koerkamp, Ragnar,
• Groot Koerkamp, R.,
• Groot Koerkamp, Ragnar or Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp} (but not Ragnar Groot Koerkamp) in BibTeX files.

Note that not all BibTex exports get this right. In particular, arXiv does not support my name, and downloading BibTex entries (derived) from it may give wrong results.

CV highlights Link to heading

More here.

• IMO 2011: Honourable mention

• IMO 2013: Bronze medal

• ICPC world finals 2016: 51st place

• At some point I solved all ~700 Project Euler problems at the time.
  

• 19th of 38 in the 2021 Google Hash Code finals.

• Second place in the parameterized track of the 2024 PACE challenge.

• P99 conference speaker in 2025 and 2026.

• 2013-2016: double bachelors Mathematics and Physics @ Utrecht University

• 2016-2017: masters Mathematics and the Foundations of Computer Science @ University of Oxford

• 2017-2020: Software engineer @ Google Zurich

• 2021-2025: PhD bioinformatics @ ETH Zurich

• 2026-2027: Postdoc high throughput bioinformatics @ Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

I am jury member for various programming contests:

• BAPC: 2017-2024, head of jury: 2018-2021
• NWERC: 2019-present, head of jury: 2022-2026