Associate Professor

Deparment of Cellular, Computational and Integrative Biology (CIBIO)

University of Trento, Trento, Italy

Email: alessandro DOT romanel ATSIGN unitn DOT it

I'm leader of the Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics laboratory at CIBIO.

Our laboratory develops innovative computational and systems-level approaches to uncover the biological mechanisms underlying cancer initiation, evolution, and treatment resistance. We integrate advanced bioinformatics methods, computational modeling, and algorithmic development to analyze next-generation sequencing and high-density genomic data within comprehensive systems biology frameworks.

We also apply artificial intelligence strategies, including protein language models and biologically informed neural networks, to enhance the interpretation of complex, high-dimensional molecular data. By combining data-driven modeling with mechanistic insight, we seek to extract clinically meaningful knowledge from large-scale genomic datasets.

A central focus of our research is to understand how genetic variation shapes cancer risk and tumor behavior. We investigate the functional consequences of genomic alterations in their regulatory and molecular contexts, examining their effects on gene expression, allele-specific activity, protein structure and function, and the perturbation of cellular networks. In particular, we study the interplay between germline and somatic variants to elucidate how inherited genetic background influences the emergence, selection, and functional impact of somatic alterations during tumor development.

Through the integration of these complementary research directions, we aim to identify robust prognostic and predictive biomarkers and to translate computational discoveries into clinically relevant advances for cancer diagnosis and treatment.