Romina D'Aurizio

Romina D'Aurizio is a Senior Researcher at the CNR Institute of Informatics and Telematics (IIT) in Pisa. She graduated in Mathematics and obtained her PhD in Computer Science and Bioinformatics at the University of Siena in 2010.  During her PhD she actively collaborated with the Research Department of Novartis V&D developing computational methods to predict the cellular localisation of Gram+/- bacterial proteins, and for comparative genomic analysis in the field of Reverse Vaccinology. As a postdoc she developed expertise in deep sequencing data analysis for de novo assembly of prokaryotic genomes and variant characterisation as a basis for investigating the relationship between genotype and phenotype. In 2012, she joined the CNR and studied he functional role of microRNAs and other ncRNAs as biomarkers, in mechanisms of anticancer drug resistance and in cardiac pathogenesis. From 2021, she leads the Computational and Translational Genomics Lab (CTGLab), a multidisciplinary team developing computational methods for multi-omics integration and dissection in cancer genomics, with an emphasis on understanding tumour heterogeneity through the analysis of genomic, transcriptomic, and epigenomic data. Her research interests focus on computational genomics and development of algorithms and methods for the identification of CNVs from massive sequencing data, the identification of miRNA target from new experimental approaches, for linking enhancer-promoter long-range interactions in neural stem cells, for tumor neoepitope and isoform detection from RNA-seq. She has also pioneered Quantum Machine Learning approaches for high-dimensional omics data and is currently exploring applications of Oxford Nanopore long-read sequencing for real-time genomic and epigenomic profiling of gliomas. Dr. D’Aurizio authored 60 peer-reviewed publications.