Research Interests and Accomplishments

Hernan Lorenzi is an Assistant Professor in the Bioinformatics Department. His research focus is on the structural and functional annotation of eukaryotic and viral genomes as well as metagenomic samples, comparative genomics and genome evolution. Dr. Lorenzi has led the annotation and analysis of several NIAID-funded Microbial Sequencing Center projects including Cryptosporidium muris, Toxoplasma gondii, Plasmodium vivax, Entamoeba histolytica, Entamoeba dispar and Entamoeba invadens and has participated in large-scale metagenomic projects, such as JCVI's Global Ocean Sampling project. He has also been involved in the design and development of several JCVI annotation pipelines, including a high-throughput functional annotation pipeline for viral metagenomic samples. He is currently the Project Leader of two NIAID-funded Genome Sequencing Center projects: a project to sequence and analyze the genomes of 63 Toxoplasma gondii strains plus two related organisms, Hammondia hammondi and Gregarina niphandrodes, and a second project to sequence 400 strains of Human Respiratory Syncytial Virus, Human Metapneumovirus, and Human Parainfluenza Virus 1 and 3. In 2011 he was awarded a grant from NASA to investigate how long-term space travel affects the biodiversity of the population of microorganisms that inhabit inside and outside the body of astronauts (microbiome).

Dr. Lorenzi received his Ph.D. in Parasite Genomics and Molecular Biology from the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina in 2001, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University.

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