Trainer biographies

Melissa F. Adasme | EMBL-EBI

Dr.-Ing. Melissa F. Adasme is a Data Mining Scientist at the Chemical Biology Services/ ChEMBL team at EMBL-EBI. She holds a degree in Bioinformatics Engineering from the Univerisity of Talca, Chile and a PhD in Computer Science from the Technical University of Dresden, Germany. Her current work involves enhancing data integration between the ChEMBL, PDBe and CCSD databases; enriching ChEMBL assays descriptions with NLP; and a text mining pipeline to identify and enhance evidence linking specific protein targets to disease phenotypes (Open Targets). Before joining EMBL-EBI, she focused her research on structure-based drug repositioning by characterising non-covalent patterns defining the binding mode of drugs. She was a developer of the Protein-Ligand Interaction Profiler (PLIP) tool which supported her past research and many others on structural bioinformatics.

Cristian Escobar Bravo | EMBL-EBI

Cristian joined EMBL-EBI in November 2023 as a Scientific Database Curator for the Protein Data Bank in Europe (PDBe). His work focuses on the annotation of macromolecular three-dimensional structures submitted to the PDB. In addition to curation, he contributes to the development of new features that enhance data accessibility and utility for the scientific community. He is also involved in training activities that showcase PDBe’s diverse resources for exploring the extensive collection of macromolecular structures. Cristian earned his PhD in Biophysics from Florida State University, where he investigated membrane proteins from Mycobacterium tuberculosis using NMR spectroscopy. He continued his research as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studying RNA structure and protein-RNA interactions.

Holly Joynes | EMBL

As a graphic designer at EMBL, I believe that design is a powerful tool to improve visual communication. My passion has always been in creating meaningful content from complex information. With 15 years industry experience, I have worked across a range of sectors, from education to fashion, within a variety of international environments. After six years at EMBL, I understand that content is king, but small changes in the way that content is delivered can have a huge impact on its reach. I love sharing these tips and believe that good design can aid in the understanding of data for everyone.

Sarah Kaspar | EMBL

Sarah joined EMBL as a biostatistician in 2020, supporting its scientific community through expert guidance in statistical data analysis, both via one-on-one consultancy and specialized training courses. Since 2024, she’s also been managing the Data Science Consulting at the EMBL Data Science Center. She received her PhD in Biology from Heidelberg University in 2019, where her research focused on developing mathematical models to understand gene expression in bacteria.

Loïc Lannelongue | University of Cambridge

Dr Loïc Lannelongue is a Senior Research Associate at the University of Cambridge leading a research group studying the environmental impacts of computing. Passionate about environmental sustainability and responsible science, he is involved in both research and policy internationally. He leads the Green Algorithms initiative, which promotes more environmentally sustainable computational science, and manages the Green DiSC certification framework for sustainable computing. He is a Software Sustainability Institute Fellow, a visiting scientist at the European Bioinformatic Institute (EMBL-EBI) and an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Fábio Madeira | EMBL-EBI

Fabio Madeira is Technical Project Lead Software Engineer at the EMBL-EBI and his work focus on providing core Bioinformatics Sequence Analysis Applications available through the EMBL-EBI website, as well as through reliable Web Services. Fabio is also involved in bioinformatics training and external user support. Before joining EMBL-EBI, Fabio worked under the supervision of Professor Geoff Barton at the University of Dundee, where he obtained a PhD in Computational Biology and worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher. His work focused on the development of new methods to predict 14-3-3-binding proteins, on the characterisation of genetic variants in protein families and interaction interfaces, and later on Bioinformatics Web Services.

Nandana Madhusoodanan | EMBL-EBI

Nandana Madhusoodanan is a Documentation and Bioinformatics Support Officer in the Job Dispatcher team, which is part of the Operations group. Her primary responsibilities include maintaining bioinformatics sequence analysis applications, offering user support, maintaining up-to-date documentation related to these services, and conducting training sessions.

Paulyna Magaña | EMBL-EBI

 Paulyna is Bioinformatician for the AlphaFold Database at the Protein Data Bank in Europe (PDBe), drives key AlphaFold education activities, supports users to best adopt AlphaFold into their work. Paulyna is also one of the scientific organisers of EMBL-EBI’s annual Structural bioinformatics course. Prior to EMBL, Paulyna studied solute carrier transporters using CRISPR-Cas9 technology at the University of Nottingham, UK, and studied Biotechnology at Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education in Mexico. Paulyna has interests in protein engineering and Artificial Intelligence.

Kalpana Panneerselvam | EMBL-EBI

I am Kalpana Panneerselvam – IntAct project lead at EBI. In IntAct, we work closely with the researchers on their direct submissions and focus on generating tissue/cell specific, disease centric interactomes. We are also interested in perturbants of molecular interactions – mutations, agonist, antagonists. Previously, I have been handling genetic variant data for commercial databases and other custom curation projects.

Iris Diana Yu | EMBL-EBI

Iris is a bioinformatician in the data production team of the Functional Genomics group in EMBL-EBI. She helps build, maintain, and improve the pipelines that produce the datasets made available via the Expression Atlas and Single-Cell Expression Atlas resources. Prior to this role, she was a research bioinformatician at the Marine Science Institute of the University of the Philippines, and a service bioinformatician at the Core Facility for Bioinformatics of the Philippine Genome Center. In those roles, she had the opportunity to handle omics projects that ranged across the health, agriculture, and biodiversity fields. Iris, currently a Cambridge resident, was born and raised in the Philippines.

Jiawei Wang | University of Bath

Jiawei is a Lecturer in the Department of Life Sciences at the University of Bath. Prior to this, he was a Marie Curie Fellow and an EMBO Non-Stipendiary Fellow at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), as well as a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge. With an interdisciplinary background in software engineering, computer science, and computational biology, Jiawei’s research combines machine learning and deep learning with single-cell genomics, metagenomics, and bioimaging. His work focuses particularly on understanding bacterial populations and embryonic development.

Andrian Yang | Cambridge Stem Cell Institute

Dr Andrian Yang is a Senior Computational Scientist in the Discovery Research Platform for Tissue Scale Biology, part of the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute. Prior to his current position, he did his postdoctoral research in EMBL-EBI and IMS Metabolic Research Laboratories with John Marioni and Florian Merkle on single-cell characterisation of human induced pluripotent cells (hiPSC)-derived POMC neurons. His research interest includes single cell and bulk omics analysis, computational method development and biological data visualisation.

Daianna Gonzalez Padilla | Wellcome Sanger Institute

Daianna earned her BSc Honours in Genomic Sciences from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 2024. She is currently a Research Assistant in human genomics in Gosia Trynka’s lab at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. Her passion for mathematics and molecular biology converges in her focus on developing and evaluating statistical methods for analyzing omics data, with applications across a broad spectrum of biomedical research questions. She also curates a blog on biostats and bioinformatics.

Ajay Mishra | EMBL-EBI

Ajay joined EMBL-EBI Training team as a Scientific Training Officer in July 2019, and is now jointly responsible for managing EMBL-EBI’s e-learning programme.

Ajay has DPhil in Biochemistry from University of Oxford where he studied the mechanisms underlying the regulation of chromosome segregation during cell division. For his post-doctoral research at Cancer Research UK, Cambridge Institute, and King’s College London, Ajay investigated the molecular mechanisms regulating the stem cell differentiation in human skin using multi-omics, imaging, and organotypic culture approaches.

After post-doctoral research, Ajay headed a biology team at Cambridge Infinitus Research Centre (CIRCE) in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology at the University of Cambridge where the key focus was to elucidate the mechanistic insight of the activity of traditional Chinese medicine in ageing and age-related human disorders such as neurodegeneration.

Nathanael Sheehan | Technical University of Munich

Nathanael Sheehan is a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at the Technical University of Munich’s School of Social Sciences and Technology. He is part of the Ethical Data Initiative and the Philosophy of Open Science research group. His research explores using mixed methods such as quantitative modelling, ethnographic observations and semi structured interviews in order to understand the historical, philosophical, social and technical dimensions of data sharing.

Juan Jose Medina Reyes | EMBL-EBI

I’m a software engineer, part of the Molecular Interactions team at EMBL-EBI.

Flaminia Zane | EMBL-EBI

Flaminia joined the EMBL-EBI Training Team in 2025 as a Scientific Training Officer for digital learning, where she jointly curates and manages the online training programme.

She holds a joint MSc in Molecular Biology and Genetics from the University of Padua, Italy, and the University of Paris Cité, France (2018). She then completed a PhD at Sorbonne University, France, in 2022, where she studied transcriptional alterations occurring at the very end of life in the model organism Drosophila melanogaster.

Outside of the lab, Flaminia has organised and delivered science communication workshops for high school students, with a special focus on molecular biology, as part of the “Live My Life as a Researcher” project started by Sorbonne University in 2018. She has also been an active member of the Young Researchers in Life Science group, a Paris-based association aimed at bringing together young researchers (Master’s/PhD students and postdocs) in France and supporting them with networking and career development.