About my research

I have always felt passionate about the design, development and administration of software tools to facilitate large processes within different fields; and how to translate them to web applications. In spring 2009, I found a new passion and interest: Computational Biology. I find this field to be full of research opportunities where my background comes really handy. Currently, I'm mainly focus on web services with tools and methods to facilitate the meta-analysis of the largest micribiome studies up to date, with the goal of moving the current state of the art from the analysis of single studies to big data.

My experience in software development has been in almost all the different possible roles, from student, mentor and professor to user, developer and team manager. In the computational biology field, my area of interest is finding new computational and algorithmic methods to compare large number of samples generated by high-throughput sequencing technologies and put them in a temporal and spatial context. In the last few years, I have worked under the supervision of Rob Knight on a vast number of projects. These range from analyzing fungal and soil communities to the NIH Human Microbiome Project, the largest effort to characterize the microbial companions of healthy individuals. Additionally, these analyses resulted in my collaboration into the creation of Quantitative Insights Into Microbial Ecology (QIIME), the full development of SitePainter (spatial microbial community visualization software), the generation of diverse temporal analytical techniques (used in recent articles published in Nature and Cell), Evident (software to estimate the sample effort for new microbial community studies) and Qiita, a large meta-analysis collaborative study and analysis web service.

Want to see something cool? The assembly of an infant gut microbiome framed against healthy human adults.