Say hi to our team

Graziano Pesole is full professor of Molecular Biology at the University of Bari "A. Moro", Director of the "Consorzio Interuniversitario Biotecnologie (Trieste), Director of the Italian Node of ELIXIR, the European Research Infrastructure for Life Sciences. Graziano Pesole, author of over 400 publications (Scopus h-index:70), was among the pioneers in Italy in the development of Bioinformatics, Comparative Genomics and Molecular Evolution. His current research interests are focused on the development and application of bioinformatics approaches for the management and analysis of massive sequencing data, even at single-cell resolution.

Bruno Fosso is Associate Professore in Molecular Biology at University of Bari Aldo Moro and Leader of the ELIXIR-IT Tools platform. He obtained a PhD in Bioinformatics in 2014 at the University of Bari discussing a thesis about the deplotyment of a workflow for DNA-metabarcodingd data analysis.The metagenomic investigation of host-associated microbiomes and environmental prokaryotic communities is the main topic of his research activity. He is an active member of the BITS, SIBBM, ISCB and ELIXIR Microbiome Community. He is author of about 50 papers on international journals.

Ernesto Picardi is Full Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of bari Aldo Moro and works is in the field of Omic Sciences, Bioinformatics and Molecular Evolution. He deals with the development of new bioinformatics methodologies and specialized databases to investigate transcriptome and epitranscriptome dynamics in eukaryotic genomes. His research activity focuses on the analysis of transcriptomic and epitranscripromic data produced through novel massive sequencing technologies for the study of gene expression and post-transcriptional modifications such as alternative splicing, RNA editing and RNA modifications.

Giuseppe is member of ELIXIR-IT impact assessment group. During his PhD in Bioinformatics and Molecular Biology (2022) at the University of Bari he focused his research on metagenomics (shotgun and amplicon-based) and in particular he developed kMetaShot a fast MAGs taxonomy classifier. Now, his main focus is the development of effective AI models for classification of eubiotic/disbiotic gut microbiomes relying on compositional profiling via DNA metabarcoding. His research is also focused on de-novo genome assembly, trascriptomics and curation of biological data.

Monica Santamaria is currently an associate professor at the Department of Soil, Plant, and Food Sciences (Di.S.S.P.A.) at the University of Bari 'Aldo Moro'. Her research focuses primarily on biodiversity studies using molecular biology and bioinformatics approaches. In particular, her scientific interests focus on metagenomic and DNA barcoding analysis of prokaryotic and eukaryotic communities residing in various types of environmental, agri-food, and clinical samples through the design, development, and application of advanced biomolecular and computational protocols. Specifically, her bioinformatics work has focused on the development and application of integrated pipelines, databases, and analysis environments for archiving and massively analyzing data produced by next-generation nucleic acid sequencing platforms. These systems were developed and are currently managed within leading European bioinformatics infrastructures such as Elixir, in which she has been involved for several years as national coordinator of the Italian Microbiome Community and member of the Food & Nutrition Community and the Biodiversity Community. In recent years, her work has focused primarily on studying the microbiome in clinical and food samples in relation to human nutrition and health, using integrated omics approaches in which the compositional and metabolomic profiles of microbial communities are correlated.