October 30, 2020

About the speaker

Dr. Marcio Almedia is a bioinformatics specialist born in Brazil where he started his studies on genetics and molecular biology. His scientific career started on the Heart Institute in Brazil where he started working on human genome data and especially with genomic annotation using public repositories. Using those tools, he developed his Ph.D. thesis in Brazil where he published his first 3 scientific manuscripts. He moved to USA to complete his studies in 2011 and he was hired by the Texas Biomedical Research Institute, one of world leaders in methodological advances to study large human families with projects focused on diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Originally, his PhD training was focused on genomic annotation with the aid of public resources and the computational prediction of functional DNA elements by the application of a trained Hidden Markov Model (HHM) algorithm. During the past seven years, he was one of the main analysts working with the San Antonio Family Studies (SAFS) project whole genome sequencing data. He started to work at UTRGV in 2015 where he successfully continued his scientific investigations. In 2018, he was appointed as an assistant professor in the Department of Human Genetics at the UTRGV’s school of medicine. During his scientific career, he has published a total of 49 scientific manuscripts.