Los Angeles, California, United States
My lifelong professional goal is to contribute to the development of affordable and widely available treatments for complex genetic diseases. I strongly believe in the power of technology to attain this goal. I currently work at PacBio as part of the Computational Biology team. I got my Ph.D. in the Quantitative and Computational Biology program at USC, where I studied cutting-edge algorithms to efficiently analyze high-throughput sequencing data for transcriptomics (RNA-Seq), DNA Methylation (Bisulfite Sequencing) and genome assembly. My sole focus since 2015 is to learn and improve sequencing data analysis to understand the complex intricacies of human genetics. My peer-reviewed Ph.D. projects include (1) writing abismal, the fastest and most memory-efficient mapper of bisulfite sequencing reads to date (2) using whole-genome bisulfite sequencing to demonstrate genome-wide effects of aging in the human sperm methylome through longitudinal studies (3) writing Falco, a C++ drop-in emulation of the FastQC program that runs at about 3x the speed and a fraction of the memory footprint and (4) developing statistical methods to discover cell phenotypes and reconstruct developmental trajectories using single-cell RNA-Seq data, leading to various publications on human nephrogenesis and its contrasts with matching developing organoids. The Ph.D. also gave me 4 years of teaching experience by leading lab sections of organismal biology and computational molecular biology courses. My graduate education is in Computer Engineering, partly from Brazil's most competitive technology institute (ITA) and partly from one of France's top engineering schools (École Polytechnique), where I also got a master's degree in Bioinformatics. My academic formation strongly emphasized high-level mathematics, theoretical computer science and efficient algorithm development. I participated and won medals and honorable mentions in various math olympiads and programming contests. These include the international mathematics competition for university studens (IMC), the Brazilian math olympiad for university students (OBMU), the Brazilian physics olympiad (OBF) and the southwestern Europe regional programming contest (SWERC).