Ana Conesa
Currently Dr. Conesa leads the Genomics of Gene Expression Lab at the Computational Genomics Program of the Centro de Investigaciones Príncipe Felipe, Valencia (Spain) and is Professor of Bioinformatics at the Microbiology and Cell Science Department at the University of Florida in Gainesville. She has recognized expertise in bioinformatics, gene expression data analysis and functional annotation. Her group has developed statistical methods and software tools that analyze the dynamics aspects transcriptomes, integrate these with other types of molecular data and annotate them functionally, with a special focus on Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) data. She is developer of software tools such as the highly-cited, field-standard Blast2GO, a suite for functional annotation of novel sequence data used by thousands scientists world-wide, Paintomics (visualization of integrated pathway data) and Qualimap (quality control of mapped NGS data). I have published statistical tools for gene expression analysis such as maSigPro (time series analysis), minAS (multivariate feature selection), ASCA-genes (multivariate multifactorial gene expression analysis), SEA (user-friendly software and functional analysis of time course gene expression data) and NOIseq (RNA-seq differential expression analysis). These bioinformatics projects have also led to an extensive set of scientific collaborations with researchers in Europe, North America, South America and South Africa to investigate gene expression in both model and non-model organisms.
Leading principal investigator of several research projects that use high-throughput sequencing for functional genomic and coordinator of STATegra, a 3-year, 6 million euro (~10 million US dollar) European FP7 funded project with eleven european and american partners, that is developing statistical tools for the integration of diverse NGS, proteomics and metabolomics data. The DEANN project is a Marie Curie Action involving 12 European and Latin American partners to create a scientific network to the study of genome variation and gene expression in endemic human, plant and animal populations using sequencing data. Other current projects deal with the development of computational approaches for the functional characterization of long noncoding RNAs and the differential functional annotation of transcript isoforms. In addition to this research Dr. Conesa has an extensive record of bioinformatics education and training. During the last five years, she has organized and taught over 20 bioinformatics short courses on five continents and collaborated in several national Master programs. She is also the founder and scientific advisor of BioBam, a bioinformatics software spin-off company that offers professional implementations of some of the tools developed at her lab.
Alejandro Giorgetti
Dr. Alejandro Giorgetti obtained his degree in Physics at the 'Universidad Nacional del Sur', Bahia Blanca, Argentina. He obtained a Master in Medical Physics at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina and a Ph.D. in Physical and Statistical Biology at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, Italy. After that, he spent three years in the Biocomputing lab. at the Universidad di Roma 'La Sapienza' before accepting his current academic position. Alejandro Giorgetti has been appointed as Assistant Professor (tenured) of Biochemistry at the University of Verona, Italy since 2007. Since his appointment, he is the Principal Investigator of the Applied Bioinformatics Group (http://molsim.sci.univr.it/bioinfo). He has authored/co-authored 35 peer-reviewed articles in medium/high impact factor journals. He has also been involved as co-author in the writing of five book chapters. He has also served as a reviewer for several journals. His research interests regard the protein structural bioinformatics area, in which he applies the latter computational techniques to biochemical/biological systems of utmost importance. The group is actively involved in different collaboration projects both within the national territory and with scientists abroad. The last years, he has been also appointed as Adjunct Visiting scientist (2011-2015) at the German Research School for Simulation Sciences (GRS), Juelich, Germany.
Edgardo Ferran
Dr. Ferrán is a key opinion leader and a recognized expert on computational biology, bioinformatics & systems biology. He worked for 24 years at Sanofi, one of the world’s top-5 pharmaceutical companies, after working 14 years in academia in Argentina. He is now visiting scientist at the Institute of Pharmacology and Structural Biology (IPBS, Toulouse, France), the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG, Barcelona Spain) and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI, Hinxton, UK).
Georgina Stegmayer
Georgina Stegmayer received the Engineering degree in Information Systems from Universidad Tecnologica Nacional Facultad Regional Santa Fe, Argentina, in 2000, and the Ph.D. degree in Electronic Devices from Politecnico di Torino, Italy, in 2006. Since 2007 she is Professor at the Department of Informatics in UTN-FRSF and UNL. She is currently Adjunct Researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) Argentina. She is author and co-author of numerous papers on journals, book chapters and conference proceedings in artificial neural networks. Her current research interests are in the fields of data mining and pattern recognition with application to bioinformatics.
Giovanni Minervini
Giovanni Minervini is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Padova. After his Ph.D. research under Prof. Fabio Polticelli at University of Roma Tre, he came to the Biocomputing UP group in 2012 under Silvio Tosatto at University of Padua. His current research projects focus on interdisciplinary applications of bioinformatics to the broad areas of cancer research. Dr. Minervini areas of expertise include molecular dynamics simulation and analysis, ab initio protein structure prediction, protein function characterization and analysis. Dr. Minervini has coauthored numerous journal publications, conference articles and book chapter in the aforementioned topics, and has received awards and grants from funding agencies including the AIRC (Italian Association for Cancer Research).
Damiano Piovesan
After his Ph.D. research under Rita Casadio at University of Bologna, Damiano came to the Biocomputing UP group in 2013 under Silvio Tosatto at University of Padua. From 2014 he became project leader for computational methods development in the same lab. His research is focused on structural biology and protein function prediction. His work is mainly based on network analysis including proteinprotein interaction to predict protein function, residue-interaction to reveal key residues in protein structures and large scale sequence similarity graphs to infer protein relationships.
Luis Diambra
Luis Diambra is currently a researcher of the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET). He graduated in 1993 at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP) in Physics. By 1996, he obtained his PhD in Neural Networks also at the UNLP. From 2007 is Group Director of the Systems Biology Lab at CREG-UNLP. His research area is the development and application of computer simulation tools oriented to System Biology. In particular, he is interested in modeling at different scales, gene expression regulation, biological rhythms, and pattern formation.
Ariel Chernomoretz
Dr. Chernomoretz obtained his PhD in Physics at the University of Buenos Aires. He spent 3 years as a Genome-Quebec postdoctoral fellow at the Bioinformatic platform of the Molecular Endocrinology and Cancer Research Center of the Laval University Medical Center (Quebec Canada). Back in Buenos Aires in 2006 he pursued his career as a full time CONICET researcher at the School of Science's Physics Department of the University of Buenos Aires, where he currently holds a Computational Physics's professor position. Since 2011 he also leads the Integrative Systems Biology Unit at Leloir Institute Foundation. His main interests are high-throughput transcriptomics, functional genomics, network biology and drug repurposing.
Fernando Carrari
Prof. Fernando Carrari is adjunct professor at the Plant Genetics and Breeding Dept of University of Buenos Aires, independent researcher of the National Council of S&T and PI at the Biotech Institute of the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA). He has developed his scientific career in Buenos Aires (1997-2000 and 2005-to date) and as a visiting scientist at the Max-Planck-Institute in Germany (2000-2004). Over the past 15 years he has developed an extensive experience in the plant molecular physiology field. He recently has contributed to the sequencing of the tomato and the wild species S. pennellii genomes.
Viviana Echenique
Viviana Echenique obtained her degree and PhD in Biology at the Universidad Nacional del Sur, Bahia Blanca, Argentina and received postdoctoral training in different foreign Institutions like the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland, the Plant Biotechnology Centre, Australia and UCDavis, California, US. Currently is Director and Principal Investigator of CERZOS (Centro de Recursos Naturales Renovables de la Zona Semiárida CCT – CONICET Bahía Blanca) and Full Professor, Departamento de Agronomía, Universidad Nacional del Sur. The group leaded by Prof. Viviana Echenique is focused on the study of the reproductive mode of Eragrostis curvula, a polymorphic grass native to Southern Africa, member of the Poaceae and naturalized in different regions of Argentina. The group adopted several strategies aimed at the elucidation of genetic and/or epigenetic mechanisms involved in apomixis pathways. Another research line is aimed at the development of biotechnological tools to assist wheat breeding programs in Argentina. The group is constituted by other four researchers, two technicians and four PhD Students. In the last five years Echenique´s lab has published 20 articles in peer reviewed journals, 3 books and 8 book chapters, three patents and received funds from National (CONICET, ANPCyT, UNS) and International Institutions (DAAD, ECOS, EU). Recently the group had gained some expertise in bioinformatics by different collaborations, especially as a member of the Wheat International Sequencing Consortium.
Hae Kyung Im
Hae Kyung Im is a researcher (Assistant Professor rank) at the University of Chicago developing models to sift through vast amounts of genomic data and generate knowledge that can be ultimately translated to improve the health of people. She received her doctoral degree in Statistics from the Department of Statistics at the University of Chicago focusing on spatial and environmental statistics. She also holds MS degrees in Physics (Instituto Balseiro) and Financial Mathematics (University of Chicago). In the spatial statistics area, she developed methods such as a semi-parametrically estimation method of spectral densities from irregularly spaced environmental datasets, a novel approach to efficiently approximate complex large-scale air quality model outputs, and a spatio-temporal approach for interpolating temperatures in the metropolitan Chicago area. Since 2009 she has worked on biomedical research enabling discoveries through a distinct statistical modeling perspective. Her current research focuses on prediction and dissection of complex traits integrating large-scale data from multiple sources. She collaborates actively with large national and international consortia such as Genotype Tissue Expression (GTEx) and T2D-GENES to identify scientific questions that are most pressing.
Marcel Brun
Marcel Brun received his Ph.D. in computer science from Universidad de San Pablo, Brazil, in 2002. Currently, he is Professor of the Department of Mathematics in the Engineering School at UNMDP, Argentina. He does research at the Digital Image Processing Lab, of the School of Engineering, UNMdP. His areas of interest include pattern recognition applied to genomic signal processing and biomedical image processing. His past research experience include postdoctoral stages at Texas A&M University (College Station, Texas), University of Louisville (Louisville, Kentucky) and the Translational Genomics Research Institute, TGen (Phoenix, Arizona). He is the author and coauthor of more than 30 journal articles, directing PhD students in Image Processing and Bioinformatics.
Silvina Ponce Dawson
Silvina Ponce Dawson obtained her Licenciatura in Physics and her PhD at the University of Buenos Aires working on astrophysical plasmas and turbulence. She was then post-doc at the University of Maryland and at Los Alamos National Laboratory where she worked on nonlinear dynamics and chaos and on pattern formation. She came back to Argentina where she became Professor at the Physics Department of the School of Exact and Natural Sciences, University of Buenos Aires, and researcher of CONICET. She started to do research in biological physics over fifteen years ago, from the point of view of mathematical modeling at first and more recently, doing optical experiments. Her current interests include cell signaling and information transmission in cells. Silvina has been deeply involved in the issue of women in physics. In particular, she has been part of the Working Group on Women in Physics of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics first as the representative of Latin America and later on as chair.
Marcelo Costabel
Dr. Marcelo Costabel received his Physics degree from the Universidad Nacional del Sur, Bahia Blanca and obtained a PhD at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata. After that, he did a postdoctoral stay working in protein crystallography at the Institut Pasteur, Paris, France. Back to Argentine he had a position as professor at the Physics Department of the UNS. From 2007 is Group Director of the Biophysics Group at DF-UNS/IFISUR, focusing his research in structure-function relationships of biological macromolecules using computational tools. In particular he is interested in analysis of electrostatic interactions and Molecular Dynamics simulations, working on different collaboration projects with national colleagues and scientists abroad.
