Say hi to our team

Dr. Angelo Romano, PhD, is a Research Scientist at the Food Safety and Quality Department, IZS PLV. With a PhD in Veterinary Sciences from the University of Turin, he has expertise in molecular diagnostics of zoonoses and foodborne pathogens. Since 2017, he has worked at the National Reference Laboratory for CPS incl. S. aureus, focusing on bacterial characterization and applying NGS technologies to investigate foodborne outbreaks.

Arnold has an MSc in Applied Physics. At the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS) in Rome since 1994. For seven years he has worked on quantitative data analysis of magnetic resonance spectra, before an experience of sixteen years in the ISS Data Center working on architecture, development and management of (bio)informatics systems. Since 2017 he joined the Department of food safety, nutrition and veterinary public health (DSANV) and is involved in the management and development of the ARIES Galaxy platform for the analysis of biomedical data, the IRIDA-ARIES platforms for the surveillance of several foodborne diseases, the development and integration of (bio)informatical systems and data analysis in general. ELIXIR-IT Local Technical Coordinator for the ISS since 2019.

Chiara Bruno is part of the ELIXIR Italy Communication, Impact, and Industry & Innovation teams. She graduated in Biomedical Sciences from Royal Holloway, University of London, and later specialized in Science Communication with a Master’s degree. With experience in managing social media, creating digital content, and coordinating outreach activities, she combines scientific knowledge with strategic communication skills.

Claudio focused his university studies in the field of Biology and has a PhD in Biomedical and Cytomorphological Sciences. PhD thesis entitled: Molecular basis of Noonan syndrome. Senior Researcher at the National Centre for Rare Diseases (RDs), Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Rome, Italy. He currently works on data management for RDs, particularly on data Findable Accessible Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) for humans and computers. ELIXIR-IT Local Technical Coordinator and co-lead community RDs.

Claudio is the Head of the Computational Biology Unit of the Research and Innovation Centre of the Fondazione Edmund Mach. After a PhD in Physics he has worked on bacterial comparative genomics, pathogen epidemiology and bacterial antigen discovery. His current research activity includes the use of metagenomic sequencing to characterise microbial diversity in environmental and host-associated samples.

Damiano Piovesan is a highly accomplished professional in computational biology, holding a Ph.D. in bioinformatics and over a decade of research experience. As an Associate Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Padua, his work focuses on the structural and functional aspects of complex biological systems, with a particular emphasis on non-globular proteins and modern machine learning approaches. He has developed software tools to predict protein features and has been actively involved in international initiatives aimed at standardizing data and promoting best practices for unbiased modeling. His research has recently expanded to investigate the critical link between cancer and intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs). Beyond his research, he is committed to training the next generation of data scientists, teaching courses in structural bioinformatics and biological data.

Daniela is a Senior Researcher at IBSBC-CNR, where she leads the ISBE Metabolomics Infrastructure within the ELIXIR network. Her work bridges multi-omics innovation with translational science, uncovering how environmental and dietary exposures rewire metabolism and shape cancer risk. She applies a One Health perspective to connect biology, environment, lifestyle and prevention in an integrated vision of sustainable health.

Diego di Bernardo received his "Laurea cum laude" in Electronic Engineering in 1997 from the University of Naples "Federico II". In 2001, thanks to a 3-year European Commission “Marie Curie” Fellowship, he was awarded a PhD in Medical Physics from the University of Newcastle School of Medicine, UK (lab of Prof. Alan Murray). He was a postdoctoral researcher first at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Center in Cambridge (UK) with Dr. Tim Hubbard and then in the laboratory of Prof. Jim Collins at Boston University, USA. In 2003, he became a Principal Investigator at TIGEM, where he also acts as Coordinator of the Genomic Medicine Program and Supervisor of the Bioinformatics Core. In 2007, he became Assistant Professor in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Naples "Federico II", in 2015 Associate Professor and then Full Professor in 2022. His research interests are strongly cross-disciplinary, blending Biomedical and Control Engineering with Molecular and Cell Biology. His lab has developed integrated experimental and computational approaches to reverse engineer gene networks and for computational drug repositioning. His lab is currently pioneering Synthetic Biology apporaches in mammalian cells to advance gene therapy. He is the author of over 100 publications in international scientific journals. His research has been funded by Telethon, AIRC, Italian Ministries of Research and Health, HFSP, by the European Union and by the ERC.

Diego is a Computational Biologist specialized in plant, currently serving as a Researcher at the Fondazione Edmund Mach (FEM) in Trento, Italy, since 2016. His research focuses on the analysis of whole-genome sequencing data for de novo assembly and variant discovery, and developing molecular markers for QTL mapping, population genomics, and association mapping. He is contributing to the development of pipelines for filtering high-throughput genotyping data and analyzing sequences from MinION and Illumina platforms. Before my current role, Diego was a Postdoctoral Researcher at IRTA in Spain (2011–2013) for the Fruitbreedomics project, where I performed QTL mapping and GWAS in Peach. He hold a PhD (2008–2011) from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (2011), and a Master's degree from the University of Padua (2007).

Emidio Capriotti is an Associate Professor at the University of Bologna (Italy). He earned a PhD in Physical Sciences from the University of Bologna, with a scientific background in Structural Bioinformatics. In recent years, his research activity has shifted toward the study of the effects of single-nucleotide variants (SNVs) resulting in single amino acid polymorphisms. He applies computational tools for the analysis of protein three-dimensional structures to predict the impact of single-point protein mutations on protein stability, developing machine learning methods to predict free energy changes upon mutation and to identify pathogenic variants. The main goal of his research is to understand the relationship between genomic variations and disease by leveraging large amounts of data generated by high-throughput techniques. He is particularly interested in designing new disease-specific algorithms and developing novel tools for personal genomics and personalized medicine.

Gianluca Della Vedova is full professor of Computer Science at the University of Milano - Bicocca (UNIMIB). His research activity focuses on algorithms in Bioinformatics and especially in computational pangenomics, phylogeny inference, and alternative splicing prediction. Within ELIXIR-IT, he has organized several training events and he is the UNIMIB representative in the General Assembly.

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.