Kathleen Marchal was born in Leuven, Belgium in 1972. She received a Master degree in Bio-Engineering in 1996 at the KU Leuven. In 1999, she obtained a PhD degree in molecular microbiology (faculty of Bioscience engineering, KU Leuven, FWO fellow). In 1999 she joined the bioinformatics group of Prof. De Moor (KU Leuven, ESAT) as postdoctoral researcher (FWO fellow). From 2004-2014 she worked as assistant/associate professor at the Department of Microbial and Molecular Systems at the KU Leuven. Since 2011 she is associate professor at Ghent University, Department of Plant Biotechnology and Bioinformatics in the framework of the multidisciplinary research partnership, 'From Nucleotides to Networks (N2N)’ (http://bioinformatics.psb.ugent.be/DBN/). Since May 2013 she is also detached to the IBCN research group at Ghent University, Department of Information Technology.
