Professor Christoffels was appointed as the Director of the South African National Bioinformatics Institute in 2009 and since 2010 he has also been the director of the South African Medical Research Council Bioinformatics Unit. His laboratory is funded through my DST/NRF Research Chair in Bioinformatics and Public Health Genomics in the main, SA Medical Research Council, European Union Horizon2020 and NRF-Kenya Bilateral grants.
His research lab focuses on infectious diseases and specifically building computational tools for analyzing high throughput genomics data. Among his software tools is the Baobab Laboratory Information Management System used by biobanks in Africa . He serves on a number of international scientific advisory boards and on the editorial board of Data Journal.