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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.

Prof. Sergio Giannattasio is Senior Associate Scientist at IBIOM-CNR, where he has been working for more than 40 years on nucleus-mitochondria crosstalk, mitochondrial retrograde pathway in cell stress response in yeast and mammalian cells, molecular basis of inherited diseases and metabolic reprogramming in cancer biology using humanized yeast. He has settled the Metabolomics Facility of the “National Research Center for Bioinformatics and Omics Sciences " (CNRBiOmics) of the Italian Node of ELIXIR research infrastructure.