Trainer biographies

Daniel Vincent Thomas Lopez – EMBL-EBI

Daniel joined the Training team in September 2020 as Scientific Project Manager, working on several EU-funded projects, mainly PerMedCoE, EOSC-Life and BioExcel. He organises and facilitates face-to-face as well as online training courses, webinars and other events.

He studied Veterinary Medicine at the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain. He holds a PhD in Molecular Biology, Biochemistry & Biomedicine, and completed the ECDC-EUPHEM fellowship (the Public Health Microbiology path of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control Programme). Over the course of his career he has worked on a variety of topics in microbiology, antimicrobial resistance and infectious diseases.

Daniel has delivered undergraduate as well as postgraduate teaching and training at different universities. He has organised several scientific conferences and events, and he is an active collaborator in science dissemination.

Filipe Zimmer Dezordi – Fundação Oswaldo Cruz – Instituto Aggeu Magalhães 

I’m interested in science, evolution, virology, and bioinformatics. I have a degree in Biotechnology but my expertise is in Bioinformatics. Currently I’m a PhD Candidate on Sciences at Fundação Oswaldo Cruz (FioCruz). During my PhD, I worked with genomic surveillance of SARS-CoV-2. I’m part of the staff that built the ViralFlow, a workflow that performs a set of genomic analyses from sequencing raw data. Moreover, I published key studies to understand several aspects of SARS-CoV-2 evolution during the pandemic in Brazil as well as I collaborate in several studies on mosquito arbovirus biology.

Gabriel da Luz Wallau – Fundação Oswaldo Cruz – Instituto Aggeu Magalhães

Public Health Researcher working at the Entomology Department and Bioinformatic core of the Aggeu Magalhaes Institute, one of the Northeast unity of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation. I have experience working in the fields such as evolutionary biology and genomics. The topics I invesigated so far cover the evolution of transposable elements, viruses and bacterial endosymbionts. In my work I use an array of bioinformatics and omics metodologies (genomics, transcriptomics) applied to vector insects and pathogens.

James Otieno – Genomic Epidemiologist – Theiagen Genomics

James has research interests in the infectious disease epidemiology of pathogens with the aim that results from such studies might inform public/global health interventions and policy. Previous work has been with viruses (RSV, influenza, hMPV, coronaviruses, and HIV) and bacteria (S. pneumoniae and C. difficille). His research aims to understand virus host jumps, virus evolution, the routes of virus spread and the factors that determine the dynamics of spread at different spatial scales. Answering these research questions involve bringing together pathogen surveillance, genomics, evolutionary processes, geography and host ecological dynamics, and employing phylodynamic and statistical approaches and tools. He also have tremendous interests in strengthening research capacity in LMICs, through designing content and training in genomic epidemiology to enable implementation of rapid outbreak investigation, response, laboratory diagnostics, and data-driven decision-making.

Juan Sebastian Andrade Martinez – Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia

PhD Candidate in Computational Biology and Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. Affiliated to Marcin Imieliński’s Lab at New York Genome Center. Research interests include viromics, viral evolution, cancer cell of origin, and structural variants in cancer.

Maira Ihsan – EMBL-EBI

Maira has an educational background in Biomedical Sciences and Bioinformatics. She works at the ENA as a User Support Bioinformatician dealing with data submission and retrieval issues on a daily basis.

Michael Quail – Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute

Michael Quail is Principal Scientific Manager DNA Pipelines R&D Group at the Sanger Institute. Michael obtained his undergraduate degree in Biochemistry from the University of Hull (1986). He then spent two years in industry at Quest International (a Unilever company). After this time Michael left to do a Ph.D investigating the cytochrome P-450 system of Botrytis cinerea. After two postdocs Michael moved to the Sanger Centre in February 1997 to work on subcloning for the pathogen sequencing program. Michael was promoted to project leader. In 2007 he gained responsibility for the whole library construction group and became Head of sequencing Library Construction. From January to October 2010 Michael had the position of Library Coordinator where he managed the library construction, 454 and mapping and archive groups. Michael was involved in the initial testing of the Solexa sequencing platform and set up a group in 2008 for preparing libraries to supply our production group. From October 2010-5 he been managed the sequencing R and D group. Michael is now Principal Scientific Manager in the DNA Pipelines R&D Group which evaluates new sequencing technologies, ancilliary equipment, molecular biology kits and reagents, and develops new sequencing applications and processes.

Nadim Rahman – EMBL-EBI

My name is Nadim Rahman and I am an Infectious Diseases Project Manager at the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) at EMBL-EBI. We are one of the organisations in the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC). I am heavily involved in several pathogen-related projects around the European COVID-19 Data Platform and Pathogens Platform, supporting collaboration, data sharing, analysis and tool development. My background includes a Biomedical Sciences undergraduate degree, prior to a Masters in Bioinformatics at Queen Mary University London. Since graduating, I completed a year’s Bioinformatics Software Developer internship at Illumina in Cambridge, before moving to the ENA at EMBL-EBI in 2018, starting off as a Software Engineer until my current position.

Nídia Trovão – Fogarty International Center

Dr. Nidia Trovao is a molecular epidemiologist at the Fogarty International Center at the US National Institutes of Health. Dr. Trovao investigates the evolutionary histories and transmission dynamics of viral pathogens using phylogenetics and phylogeographic modeling. Dr. Trovao has a background in Cellular and Molecular Biology from the NOVA University in Lisbon, Portugal, and a Master’s degree and Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences from KULeuven, Belgium. She has worked in uncovering the molecular epidemiology of pathogens ranging from HIV, HBV, rotavirus, RSV, influenza, SARS-CoV-2, and others during her scientific journey. Dr. Trovao has also served as a reviewer for various peer-review journals, including Virus Evolution and Nature Microbiology.

Pedro E. Romero – Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia

From 2023, Assistant Profesor at Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (Lima, Perú). PhD in Natural Sciences (Goethe University, Frankfurt). Currently, Lecturer at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia. My interest are Evolution, Biogeography and Molecular Ecology. In addition, I am interested in studying the molecular basis of the adaptation to new habitats (for instance, sea-to-land transitions). During the COVID pandemic, I collaborated in the Peruvian genomic surveillance initiative using molecular phylogenies to understand the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in South America.

Zahra Waheed – EMBL-EBI

Zahra is a SARS-CoV-2 Bioinformatician at the European Nucleotide Archive, where she engages with organisations to set up data brokering on a national level, is involved in monitoring international SARS-CoV-2 data flow to the ENA, and works on helpdesk for both SARS-CoV-2 and other pathogen queries. She joined EMBL-EBI in January 2020, and before this completed her MSc in Genomic Medicine from St George’s University and King’s College London.