Thomas Smits

Biography

Associate in Biomedical Informatics

Thomas Smits is an Associate in Biomedical Informatics. He received his Master’s in Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School, after his Bachelor’s degree in Life Science & Technology and a transfer program in Computer Science at the Delft University of Technology. Thomas is passionate to persue his interests in genomics. He is working in the HIDIVE lab on making the grammar-based genomic visualisation tool Gosling more accessible by rendering automatic text descriptions. He is furthermore working on improving the way to visualize cell types and abundances in the context of single cell data.

News

• IEEE VIS 2024
• Talks, posters, and tutorial at ISMB@2025

Publications

• Advances and prospects for the Human BioMolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP)
• The State of Single-Cell Atlas Data Visualization in the Biological Literature
• A comprehensive evaluation of life sciences data resources reveals significant accessibility barriers
• Multimodal Retrieval of Genomics Data Visualizations
• AltGosling: Automatic Generation of Text Descriptions for Accessible Genomics Data Visualization
• Explaining Unfamiliar Genomics Data Visualizations to a Blind Individual through Transitions
• Using OpenKeyNav to Enhance the Keyboard-Accessibility of Web-based Data Visualization Tools