I’m the Head of Bioinformatics at the Quadram Institute Bioscience, with an interest in reproducible and scalable pipelines and microbial (meta)genomics data analysis.
I pursued a PhD in Biochemistry and Biotechnology, focusing on bioinformatics applications for Next Generation Sequencing since the field’s advent. In Italy, I led the bioinformatics activities of a sequencing provider (BMR Genomics), moving to the UK in 2017 to join the Core Bioinformatics team at this Institute.
Research interests
I have been working on microbial genomics since my MSc, where I analysed microarray data to study the transcriptional landscape of Photobacterium profundum SS9, a deep-seq bacterium.
I later gained interest in the microbiome and, in particular, in the methodologies to ensure reproducible and accurate analysis of amplicon and whole metagenome sequencing datasets.
Open source and development
I mostly program in Python, but I have developed a special interest in Nim, a compiled and memory safe language, and I chose Nextflow as the main workflow manager for our pipelines.
I developed some bioinformatic tools, such as SeqFu and BamToCov, and pipelines for microbial genomics, such as Dadaist2.
