People RNAseq Workshop 2016

Marco Salvemini - ORGANIZER, COURSE TUTOR

Department of Biology, University of Naples Federico II, Napoli, ITALY

Marco Salvemini is Researcher and Lecturer in Genetics at the Department of Biology of the University of Studies of Naples Federico II.
His main scientific interest is the study of sex determination in Insects to increase knowledge about the molecular mechanisms regulating this important developmental event and to produce new biotechnological tools for the control of agricultural pests and disease vectors.
In the last years Marco started to apply Next Generation Sequencing and bioinformatics to his studies to approach the general problem of identifying sex-specifically and sex-biased genes by comparing dipteran sexed de novo assembled transcriptomes from various developmental stages and species.
Marco is also developing new graphical interfaces and on-line databases for comparative genomics and digital gene expression analyses in biological samples with opposite sexes.


Serena Aceto - ORGANIZER, COURSE TUTOR

Department of Biology, University of Naples Federico II, Napoli, ITALY

Serena Aceto is Associate Professor of Genetics at the Department of Biology of the University of Naples Federico II.
Her scientific interests are focused on molecular phylogeny, population and evolutionary genetics, mainly referred to plant species. In particular, she studies genes involved in flower development of Mediterranean orchid species. She has also studied the genetic structure of natural populations of fungi (truffles) and the molecular evolution of the methallotionein genes in mussels.
During the last years, her research activity has switched to transcriptome analysis of coding and small non-coding RNAs involved in flower development.
As a consequence of this new scientific interest, she has acquired, in strict collaboration with Marco Salvemini, abilities in managing and analyzing transcriptome next generation sequencing data.


Brian J. Haas - OPEN DAY SPEAKER, COURSE LECTURER

Broad Institute, Cambridge, MA, USA

Brian J. Haas is Senior Computational Biologist at the Broad Institute, USA. He is the lead developer of the Trinity RNA-Seq platform and with more then 18,000 scientific citations, he is one of the first career-bioinformaticians, ever.
He started his career at The Institute for Genomic Research in 1999, and later he moved to the Broad Institute in 2007.
Haas has contributed to dozens of genome sequencing and annotation projects, and has pioneered numerous open source bioinformatics software projects with a general focus on genome and transcriptome sequence annotation and analysis.


Mark D. Robinson - OPEN DAY SPEAKER

University of Zurich, Zurich, SWITZERLAND

Mark D. Robinson is Assistant Professor of Statistical Genomics at the Institute of Molecular Life Sciences of the University of Zurich.
His research group is developing statistical methods for interpreting high-throughput sequencing and other genomics technologies in areas such as genome sequencing, gene expression and regulation and analysis of epigenomes.
Prof. Robinson is the author of one of the best and widely used software for digital differential expression analysis, the edgeR tool, freely available.


Remo Sanges - OPEN DAY SPEAKER

Zoological Station Anton Dohrn, Napoli, ITALY

Remo Sanges is Researcher at the Zoological Station “Anton Dohrn” in Naples where he directs the bioinformatics laboratory. Remo took a Ph.D. In Computational Biology at the Telethon Institute of Genetics and Medicine (TIGEM). He worked in the EnsEMBL group at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) with a Marie Curie fellowship.
From 2006 to 2010, he was responsible for coordinating the design and analysis of bioinformatics at the Technology Cluster in Molecular Biomedicine (CBM) in Trieste. There he obtained the certification UNI EN ISO 9001:2000 for the provision of bioinformatics services.
Remo's main scientific interests are the large-scale analysis of transcripts and regulatory regions, the isolation and characterization of conserved non-coding sequences, their evolution and involvement in development and disease.


Giuseppe Saccone - OPEN DAY SPEAKER

Department of Biology, University of Naples Federico II, Napoli, ITALY

Giuseppe Saccone is Researcher and Lecturer in Genetics at the Department of Biology of the University of Naples Federico II. In 1994-1995 and in 1999 (CNR fellowship, Italy), Giuseppe worked at IMBB (Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology; Crete, Greece) contributing to the development of the first gene transfer technique in the agricultural pest insect Ceratitis capitata.
His main contributions to this research area consist in the discovery of an novel autoregulatory function for the transformer gene which is widely conserved in Insects, in the development of a novel biotechnological approach to the production of male only progeny (Int. Pat. WO/2002/070686) and in the evolutionary studies on sex determining pathways in pest fruit flies and vector diseases mosquitoes (He received in 2004 a WHO/TDR grant for an Aedes aegypti research project).
Recently, he started to apply RNA-seq to the study of sex determination in the Mediterranean fruit fly Ceratitis capitata.


Chiara Dal Fiume - OPEN DAY SPEAKER

Illumina Italy Srl, Milano, ITALY

Chiara Dal Fiume is Library preparation sales specialist for Illumina Italy. Her activity is focused on providing a full sample to answer solutions for new and existing customers for consumable and library preparation kits in NGS.
Her pre-sales activity includes the delivery of technical expertise during the sales process including consultation on applications, assay design and data analysis/interpretation. She has a master degree in Biology and a Phd in Molecular Medicine at Milan University, Italy.


Giorgio Giurato - OPEN DAY SPEAKER

Genomix4Life Srl, Salerno, ITALY

Giorgio Giurato is senior bioinformatician at the Laboratory of Molecular Medicine and Genomics of the University of Salerno. His main expertise concerns next generation sequencing and microarray data analysis, including development of novel computational methods. During his PhD and post-doctorate his research focused mainly on the role of small non-coding RNAs, RNA splicing and transcription factors in cancer.
He is co-founder of Genomix4Life Srl, a spin-off dedicated to genomics and bioinformatics research and services, and head of the bioinformatics section of the Company.


Piero Altoè - OPEN DAY SPEAKER

E4 Computer Engineering, Scandiano, Reggio Emilia, ITALY

Piero Altoè is Marketing & Business Development Manager of E4 Computer Engineering SpA. He has more than 8 years of experience in computational chemistry and he is author of 30 papers published on international scientific journals.
He joined the E4 team as HPC Specialist in 2010. Piero Altoè achieved his Ph.D. in 2007 at the Università di Bologna focusing his attention on the development and applications of hybrid quantum and molecular mechanics methods.
Since 2002 he’s been involved in high performance computing activities related to software development and system administration.


Allegra Via - COURSE LECTURER

IBBE, CNR, Bari, IT

Contact: a.via@ibbe.cnr.it - allegra.via@gmail.com

Allegra Via is a physicist and scientific researcher at the Institute of Biomembranes and Bioenergetics (IBBE) of the National Research Council (CNR, Bari, IT). In 2003, she got her PhD at the University of Rome "Tor Vergata", where she also worked six years as postdoc. In 2009 she moved to the Sapienza University as researcher, and, since January 2016, she works full time as the ELIXIR Italy Training Coordinator. She is involved in the design, organisation and delivery of bioinformatics training courses, in Train the Trainer activities, and collaborates with other ELIXIR's nodes on many training-related initiatives. She has a long track record of academic teaching (Macromolecular Structures, Python programming, Bioinformatics, Biochemistry, Protein interactions). Her main research interests include protein structural bioinformatics, protein function prediction and analysis, and protein interactions. She is a member of the Global Organisation of Bioinformatics Learning, Education and Training (GOBLET) and a Software/Data Carpentry Instructor.


Vincenza Colonna - OPEN DAY SPEAKER, COURSE TUTOR

Institute of Genetics and Biophysiscs Adriano Buzzati-Traverso, Napoli, ITALY

Vincenza Colonna is group leader at the Institue of Genetics and Biophysics of the Italian National Research Council in Napoli, Italy. She works in human genomics and her main research interests are natural selection and consanguineous populations. She graduated from University of Napoli Federico II (Italy) and did postdoctoral work at University of Ferrara (Italy) and at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (UK). She was lectures in Genetics and Bioinformatics at the University of Ferrara (Italy). She is also leading the ObiLab project on training in bioinformatics.


Stefano Perrini - COURSE TUTOR

University of Naples Federico II, Napoli, ITALY

IT Expert, System Administrator and web developer of this website. Tutor, but mainly Obifriend of ObiLab project on training in bioinformatics.