Research Interests and Accomplishments

Paolo Amedeo, Ph.D. is a Lead Bioinformatics Engineer at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) presently involved in developing a pipeline to support the annotation and GenBank submission of viral genomes. His scientific interests span from mycology to gene silencing and virology.

Dr. Amedeo joined JCVI through one of its legacy organizations, TIGR, as a Bioinformatics Analyst working on the annotation of Cryptococcus neoformans, a basidiomycetous fungus known for being an opportunistic human pathogen responsible for severe lung infections and meningitis. It is also the first basidiomycetes to be sequenced and annotated. Additionally, he collaborated in the annotation and genomic analysis of Entamoeba histolytica. Following this work he joined the Bioinformatics Core Team as a Bioinformatics Engineer. In that position he contributed to many eukaryotic genomic sequencing projects (mostly fungi and insects) by improving the annotation pipelines, running custom analysis, and interacting with collaborators. Subsequently, he managed a team of bioinformatics engineers supporting all eukaryotic genomic projects.

He obtained a Master’s degree in Molecular Biology from the University of Pavia, IT in 1995 and a Ph.D. in Plant molecular Biology/Botany from the University of Basel, CH in 2000. From 2000 through 2003 Dr. Amedeo worked at the Torrye Mesa Research Institute (Syngenta) in San Diego, CA first as Posdoctoral Associate, then as Bioinformatics Specialist, working on the genomes of plant-pathogenic fungi.

Select Publications