About Me
I am a computational biologist working as a consultant with the Quintarelli Laboratory in Oncohematology at Ospedale Pediatrico Bambino Gesù (OPBG) in Rome, Italy.
My current work is in pediatric cancer genomics and CAR-T cell therapy development. I analyze long-read Nanopore whole genome sequencing (WGS) and bulk RNA-seq to characterize T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL), covering structural variant and single nucleotide variant detection. I also work on therapeutic target discovery for rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS) using single cell and bulk RNA-seq from patient derived xenograft models and patient cohorts, and on transcriptome profiling of armored CAR.GD2.mbIL15 T cells in a neuroblastoma model.
Alongside the analysis work, I built the laboratory’s compute infrastructure. This included an on-premise Ubuntu cluster with a HyperQueue job scheduler and containerized scientific software, and a comparative evaluation of AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and GARR for genomic workloads that meet Italian and GDPR health data privacy requirements.
Previously I was a senior computational biologist on the Research Scientific Computing team at Seattle Children’s Research Institute (SCRI) in beautiful Seattle, WA. I led the data analysis strategy for projects across oncology, developmental biology, and infectious disease, developed and adapted scalable genomics data pipelines using Nextflow and nf-core tools, and provided guidance on utilizing the high performance compute (HPC) cluster to empower researchers to access the computational resources at SCRI.
Before that I supported pediatric acute myeloid leukemia (AML) translational research studies from the National Cancer Institute’s TARGET initiative using genomic and transcriptomic ‘big data’ from next generation sequencing at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center (FHCC).
