Segata Lab
Computational Metagenomics

Gloria joined the lab in January 2023 as a postdoctoral researcher to study the human gut microbiome in relation to diet and disease. She obtained her PhD in Biology at Ulm University, Germany, where her work focused on anthropogenic disturbances to wildlife gut microbiomes. Her research interests lie in combining computational metagenomics with microbial and statistical ecology to elucidate the unknowns of the gut microbiome.

Vitor joined the lab in June 2023 as a postdoctoral fellow. His research interests include the role of oral bacteria in oral diseases and the interaction between food and human microbiomes.

Paolo joined the lab in January 2017. His main research interests are bounded in the understanding of shared patterns in the link between the mammalian microbiome and host’s health. He applies statistical methods and machine learning approaches to understand the relationship between mammals and their microbiome(s).

Liviana joined the lab in January 2021, to study human uncharacterized bacterial species and mechanisms of horizontal transmission of non-pathogenic bacteria. She completed her PhD at the Rowett Institute (Aberdeen, UK) where she focused on in vitro characterization of single microbial species, and of microbe-microbe and microbe-host interactions. She is interested in bacterial metabolic functions and their participation to host health and defense from infections.

Sabry joined the lab in November 2022 as a postdoctoral fellow. He is working with Christian Fuchsberger from Eurac Research to analyze the microbiome and metabolomics data of the Cooperative Health Research In South Tyrol (CHRIS) study in relation to type 2 diabetes and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).

Svetlana joined the lab in November 2023 after her wet-lab and dry-lab postdoc experience at University of Glasgow (UK), University of Porto (Portugal) and Fudan University (China). Svetlana is a strong supporter of open science and open source initiatives.

Sabrina is a Group Scientist in the Department of Experimental Oncology at IEO, Istituto Europeo di Oncologia in Milan, Italy). Here, she is leading a project about gut microbiome in healthy aging and she is interested in understanding the role of gut microbiome in: modulating cancer risk, preventing cancer development and responding to cancer treatment especially for immunotherapy approaches. She performed her postdoctoral training at Icanh School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (New York, USA) studying the viable gut microbiome during fecal microbial transplantation in Clostridium difficile patients.

Federica is a biologist working as a wet lab technician, she joined the lab in March 2015. Currently she is processing the samples from different projects, preparing them for sequencing.

After her PhD and postdoctoral experience in microbiology, Federica, as a a scientific project coordinator, is currently supporting the research of the team in many aspects: from proposal writing, projects management, report writing, PhDs and postDocs assistance, to recruiting and administrative and financial aspects.

Katarina joined the lab in March 2022. She obtained her Master's degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Novi Sad (Serbia). She is working on developing software tools and managing of computational pipelines.

Giacomo joined the lab in November 2019. He is a PhD student jointly supervised by Nicola Segata and Christian Fuchsberger from Eurac Research. His project involves studying the interaction of the salivary microbiome with genetic, lifestyle, and physiological parameters in the context of the Cooperative Health Research In South Tyrol (CHRIS) study.

Joint with: Christian Fuchsberger (EURAC Research)

Matteo joined the lab in April 2021. He obtained his Master's degree in Quantitative and Computational Biology at University of Trento. His main research interest is the bioinformatic analysis of CRISPR/Cas systems in the human microbiome.

Joint with: Laboratory of Molecular Virology - University of Trento (PI: Annna Cereseto)

Hrituraj has a background in zoology and bioinformatics. He joined the lab in February 2024 after obtaining a Master's degree in Bioinformatics from India. His study is focused on the metagenomic analysis of the gut microbiome and how its shape is affected during a person-to-person microbiome transmission.

Davide has a background in biotechnology and quantitative and computational biology. He began his PhD in 2021, with a strong interest in metagenomics, specifically in metagenomic assembly and functional and phylogenetic analysis of undercharacterized microbial species.

Amin joined the lab in November 2023 as an industrial PhD student within a cooperation program with Prebiomics S.r.l. His major interests are development and implementation of a semi-automated human microbiome analysis pipeline for the provision of third party services.

Roberta joined the lab in August 2023. She holds a MSc in Molecular and Cellular Biotechnology from the University of Trento. Her thesis delved into the intriguing interplay between the gut microbiome and the regulation of anticancer immune responses. Roberta explores the microbial potential of fermented foods and their relationship with the human gut microbiome.

Claudia joined the lab in 2023. She obtained her Master's degree in Bioinformatics at Ghent University. Her work is focused on computational tools for metagenomic analyses.

Amir joined the lab in October 2021. He focused on the metabolic interplay between the gut microbiome and immune system in colorectal cancer patients during his Master’s degree in Molecular Biology of the Cell (UniMi-IEO) and his following fellowship. As a PhD student, he tries to unravel links between the human microbiome and healthy aging as well as cancer.

Gianmarco obtained his BSc degree in Biotechnology at University of Salento and MSc degree in Quantitative and Computational Biology at University of Trento. He worked one year in a pre-doc position in the group of Prof. Nicola Segata on a computational tool for estimating SyngenicDNA, before starting his PhD in 2020. He's currently working on gut microbiome associations with colorectal cancer and with chemo- immunotherapy treatments outcomes.

Elisa joined the lab in 2021 after obtaining her Master's degree in Quantitative and Computational Biology. She is currently studying relations between healthy aging, cancer, and the human microbiome.

Michal joined the lab in September 2020. He's in charge of developing an improved version of StrainPhlAn and maintaining a huge database of MAGs. He's applying strain tracking methods on various datasets, such as fecal microbiota transplant to study the dynamics of microbial engraftment or babies in a daycare to understand the dynamics of early life microbiota.

Andrea joined the lab in November 2019. He obtained his Master's degree in Evolutionary Biology at the University of Padova with a thesis on the molecular evolution of Zika virus. He is currently a PhD student in Agrifood and Environmental Sciences, co-supervised by Dr. Omar Rota-Stabelli from Edmund Mach Foundation. His research interests include virus evolution, phylogenomics and metagenomics.

Joint with: Omar Rota-Stabelli (Fond. Edmund Mach)

Linda joined the lab in 2023 as a student of the Master in Quantitative and Computational Biology, for a thesis focused on applying machine learning to link the human gut microbiome with various host disease conditions. She is currently working on metagenomic profiling strategies for long-read sequencing data.

Serena joined the lab in November 2014, where she pursued her PhD in 2019 focusing on host-microbiome interactions, including human and non-human hosts, and the vertical transmission of microbiome members from mothers to infants. In 2020, she started building the Microbiome Virtual International Forum (MVIF) with Nicola Segata and Levi Waldron, whose inaugural event took place in September 2021. Serena now serves as the main manager of MVIF and works as a Scientific Project Manager at PreBiomics, focusing on the oral microbiome.

Mireia joined the lab in 2019. She pursued her PhD on the role of the gut microbiome in mental health at the Raes Lab (VIB-KU Leuven, Belgium), and as a postdoctoral fellow at the Segata Lab she studied human microbiome transmission by large scale strain-level metagenomic profiling. From September 2023 she also leads the Microbiome Research Group at UPF (Barcelona, Spain).