Say hi to our team

Manuela Helmer Citterich is Professor of Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics in the University of Rome Tor Vergata, for the Degree in Biological Sciences, for the Degree in Biotechnology and for the Master Degree in Bioinformatics. She is the Italian representative in the 3D Bioinfo Community. Her research interests comprise: the development of tools for the functional and structural annotation of lncRNA, for the inference of protein-RNA interaction, and more.

Currently Researcher at CNR-IBIOM. He obtained a PhD in Physics at the University of Bari (Bari, Italy) in 2015, working within the ALICE experiment at the LHC (CERN, Geneva) for 4 years. Since 2015 he has been involved in the ELIXIR-IT community, developing Cloud services for bioinformatics and integrating new tools within the Galaxy workflow manager. In particular, he leads the development of the Laniakea platform, which allows the creation of on-demand Galaxy instances on the Cloud, and the UseGalaxy.it national Galaxy server. He is involved in several European Horizon projects ELIXIR-STEERS, GDI and GoE, and led the WP3 of the EuroScienceGateway project (2022-2025).

Marco Beccuti is scientific coordinator of InfoLife National Laboratory of CINI, technical coordinator of ELIXIR Node of the Università degli Studi di Torino, scientific coordinator of the laboratory "HPC for biomed and AI" in ICxTopen_in_new, Chair of the Scientific Committee of the "HPC4AI laboratory" open_in_new at the Università degli Studi di Torino, and scientific co-coordinator of "Quantitative Biology" (q-Bioopen_in_new) group. He is also member of the "Performance Evaluation and System Validation" group (QMIPSopen_in_new), of "Bioinformatics ITalian Society" (BITSopen_in_new), and of the "Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario per le Telecomunicazioni" (CNIT). His research is currently mainly focused on: 1) designing FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Re-usable) workflows for the analysis of deep sequencing data (i.e. genomic, transcriptomic and single cell data); 2)developing modeling and analysis techniques for studying complex biological systems.

Marco Masseroli is an Associate Professor at the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering of Politecnico di Milano and co-Coordinator of the Master Degree in Bioinformatics for Computational Genomics joint between Politecnico di Milano and Università degli Studi di Milano. He leads the Data Science for Bioinformatics lab of Politecnico di Milano, and the Computational multi-Omics of Neurological Disorders (MIND) Lab within the Joint Research Platform between Politecnico di Milano and Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Neurologico “Carlo Besta”. He is lecturer of the courses "Bioinformatics and Computational Biology" and "ICT for Health Care" for the Masters of Science in Computer Science and Engineering and in Biomedical Engineering. He is an evaluator of research projects for the European Union and a reviewer for several international scientific journals. His research is on Data Science applied to Medical Informatics, Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics, mainly in oncology and neurology, focused on genomic databanks, controlled vocabularies and bio-ontologies to effectively retrieve, manage, query and share heterogeneous genomic, biomedical and clinical information for their semantic integration with patient clinical and high-throughput genomic data and their comprehensive multimodal analysis with Machine Learning approaches. He is the author of more than 200 peer-reviewed papers on international journals and conference proceedings in the fields of Bioinformatics, Medical Informatics and bioimage processing and analysis.

Maria Cristina Aspromonte is the co-lead of the ELIXIR IDP Community (Italy and Europe). She has been an Assistant Professor (RTDa) in Biochemistry at the Department of Biomedical Sciences of the University of Padova since March 2023. She obtained her PhD in Developmental Medicine and Health Planning Sciences in 2021. During her PhD, she specialized in experimental setups and genome analysis of genetic pediatric diseases, particularly neurodevelopmental disorders. She has also focused on structural biology, with specific expertise in the characterization, interpretation, and standardization of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) and intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs). She is the manager of one of the major manually curated databases of IDPs/IDRs, which is a service of the ELIXIR IDP Community and part of the ELIXIR infrastructure. She is also directly involved in the collaborations of the ELIXIR IDP Community and with other consortia (Gene Ontology, HUPO-PSI), as well as in ELIXIR Implementation Studies.

Experienced Professor of Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics in the Dept. of Agricultural Sciences and Associate Scientist of the Marine Station Anton Dohrn, where she organized and coordinates the Biocomputing, Data Analitics and Management Service (BAC). She has demonstrated history of working for science. Skilled in Molecular Biology and Evolution, Life Sciences, expert in Genomics, Metagenomics, Integrative omics Bioinformatics, Systems Biology, Open Data. Graduated from Biological Sciences University Federico II Naples, PhD in the Second University of Naples, Post Doc in The Marine Station Anton Dohrn. She had experience in Tokyo, Gainsville (Florida), Paris for research activities and collaborations with international (extra-Europe) and european consortia and networks. Responsible and coordinator of Activities in National and International Projects (EU and non EU). Member of working groups in ELIXIR; in EMBRC; participates in EOSC. Main current fields of research interest: environmental impact on health and fertility, role of extracellular nucleic acids in biodiversity (environmental nucleic acids) and health (at organism level: from prokaryotes to eukaryotes ( H. sapiens included). Methods: bioinformatics, omics and meta-omics, nutrigenomics.

Marina Mordenti is a senior researcher in the Rare Skeletal Disorders Department at IRCCS Istituto Ortopedico Rizzoli. She graduated with degrees both in veterinary biotechnology and in molecular and cellular biology, and she holds a PhD in histopathological veterinary disciplines. Her research focuses on disease registries for rare bone disorders and modeling platforms for biomedical data management. She specializes in all aspects related to data management, from privacy issues to data curation. She is involved in several national and international projects and is the author of peer-reviewed publications.

Marinella Marzano, phD, is a biologist specialized in Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics, with extensive experience in genomic analyses, particularly metagenomics, and molecular biodiversity. She is a researcher at the Institute of Biomembranes, Bioenergetics and Molecular Biotechnologies (IBIOM) of the National Research Council (CNR) in Bari, where she focuses on the development, optimization, and application of genomic methodologies based on Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies, as well as on the bioinformatic analysis of biological sequences. Her research interests include the taxonomic and functional characterization of microorganisms from environmental and clinical samples, with the aim of exploring the impact of the microbiome on living systems. She is the author of publications in international peer-reviewed journals and actively contributes to numerous regional, national, and international research projects, taking on various responsibilities and maintaining a strong focus on innovation and applied research. In addition to her research activities, she is involved in the design and implementation of Quality Management Systems (QMS) inspired by Good Laboratory Practices (GLP) and participates in the development of innovative biotechnology projects, fostering collaboration between research and industry.

Mario Nicodemi is Full Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Naples Federico II and Einstein Visiting Professor at the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin. For his scientific discoveries at the frontier between physics and biology he was awarded in 2016 the Einstein BIH Fellowship by the Einstein Foundation, and in 2022 the Occhialini Medal and Prize by the UK Institute of Physics and the Italian Physical Society. He has previously held a professorship at the UK Complexity Science Centre at the University of Warwick, and worked at Imperial College London and at ESPCI in Paris. He coordinated the Theoretical Physics group at the Italian Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) in Naples and the INFN National Project (IS) on Biological Physics. At Federico II, he leads the University’s Task Force on Computational Biology. He is also a member of numerous international research panels, including the 4D Nucleome consortium of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the USA, the Berlin Institute of Health in Germany, and the Agence Nationale de la Recherche in France.

He studied Physics at Sapienza University of Rome and obtained a PhD from L. Pasteur University in Strasbourg (France). He promotes and manages national and European projects in the field of HPC and cloud computing, with a particular focus on applications in computational molecular science. He is currently the principal investigator and manager of the ENEA DataCLEEN project within the European IPCEI-CIS (Cloud Infrastructure and Services) initiative. He led the Italian IEMAP (Italian Energy Materials Acceleration Project) within the international Mission Innovation initiative. He is the author of over 100 scientific articles published in international journals.

Matteo Chiara graduated in Functional Genomics and Bioinformatics from the University of Milan in 2009. He completed his Ph.D. in Biological and Molecular Sciences at the same institution in 2012. Over the course of his career, he has carried out research between the Department of Biosciences of the University of Milan and the Institute of Biomembranes, Bioenergetics and Molecular Biotechnologies (IBIOM) of the National Research Council (CNR). Since 2023, Matteo has served as Associate Professor of Molecular Biology at the Department of Biosciences of the University of Milan. His research group focuses on the development and implementation of computational methods and algorithms for the analysis of genomic data generated by high-throughput next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies. In addition to his academic role, Matteo is co-leader of the Italian Federated Human Data Platform within ELIXIR Italy. In this capacity, he contributes to the design, coordination, and implementation of national infrastructures for the management, integration, and secure sharing of human genomic data. His activities within ELIXIR Italy emphasize interoperability, data stewardship, and the creation of computational frameworks that facilitate large-scale analyses of human genomic diversity. This work plays a key role in strengthening the capacity of the Italian and European scientific community to leverage federated resources for biomedical research, clinical applications, and precision medicine initiatives.

Matteo is one of the Italian representatives in the ELIXIR Biodiversity Community. He holds a PhD in Animal Biology (University of Milan, 2013), where he studied symbiotic arthropods and host-symbiont coevolution. His research focuses on: (i) arthropod systematics and evolution, especially leaf beetles (Chrysomelidae); (ii) insect-microorganism-plant interactions; (iii) arthropod biodiversity in agroecosystems, exploiting also innovative eDNA approaches.