Trainer biographies
Aurélien Luciani | EMBL-EBI
Project lead for the frontend development of the resources at UniProt at the EMBL-EBI
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.
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.
Typhaine Paysan-Lafosse | EMBL-EBI
Typhaine leads the curation team for the InterPro and Pfam databases at EMBL-EBI, where she develops innovative tools and workflows to enhance data treatment and analysis. In this role, she combines her technical expertise with strategic leadership to advance protein sequence classification and annotation. Beyond her core responsibilities, Typhaine actively contributes to the scientific community through bioinformatics training initiatives and serves as a key communicator for InterPro/Pfam external engagement. Her previous experience includes significant contributions to the Genome3D project, bridging the InterPro and PDBe databases. Before joining EMBL-EBI, Typhaine served as a bioinformatician at the international ImMunoGeneTics information system (IMGT) in Montpellier, France, where she successfully managed IMGT/3Dstructure-DB and IMGT/2Dstructure-DB. She holds a Master’s degree in Bioinformatics from the University of Bordeaux (2013).
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.
Fabio 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.
Ajay Mishra | EMBL-EBI
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. 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.
