Introducing new member of Bio2Q

We are excited to welcome Dr. Leonard Dubois as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Bio-1 Core of Bio2Q.

“Hello, I am joining Bio2Q as a bioinformatics postdoctoral researcher to help with all kinds of biological data analysis, integration and interpretation. I started my bioinformatics journey during my bachelor degree and then gradually specialized my field of interest towards the microbiome.

It all started with a master internship at EMBL Heidelberg in the group of Dr. Nassos Typas. There, I became aware of how truly fascinating microorganisms can be.

Then, my work in the Metagenopolis lab near Paris made me focus on biostatistical approaches to handle microbiome data. Things became clearer to me, not only were microorganisms amazing but they are also the source of the challenging and exciting data.

I naturally searched for a PhD position revolving around microbiome and landed in Pr. Nicola Segata’s lab at the University of Trento. Co-supervised by Dr. Mireia Valles-Colomer, I delved into computational metagenomics and especially strain-level analysis. We tracked conspecific strains across samples to unravel the dynamics of mother-infant strain transmission, persistence and functional diversity, particularly with regards to perinatal factors (mode of delivery, breastfeeding…). In brief, microbiome data analysis can provide enough detail to make each and every bacterial strain truly unique.

During the following post-doctoral experience in the lab of Pr. Harry Sokol I connected the computational approaches to medical applications. I analyzed many samples of patients with inflammatory bowel diseases using metagenomics and metabolomics.

In Bio2Q, I aim to pursue strain-level computational approaches in order to deepen the understanding of microbiome and its variation. In the meantime, I always loved interaction with wet-lab biologists and integration of various types of data to get a glimpse of the bigger picture: the role of the human microbiome in health and disease.

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