Dr. José Pereira-Leal has a PhD in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Oporto (Portugal), having performed all the thesis research work at the Imperial College School o Medicine (London, UK) and the Souwestern Medical School at Dallas (Texas, USA). His PhD thesis focused on the biochemistry and bioinformatics of proteins involved in genetic diseases. He was a post doctoral fellow at the EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute and at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology, both in the UK, in the areas of Computational/Systems Biology and Bioinformatics. After 10 years abroad, he returned to Portugal where he established and coordinated the Computational Genomics Laboratory, supervising post-docs, PhD and MSc students, as well as clinicians, in projects on comparative genomics, medical genomics and data integration. He also coordinated the Bioinformatics Unit of the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, where he helped establishing the European biological data infrastructure ELIXIR, and its national counterpart, the Portuguese biological data infrastructure BioData.pt. He is a founder and the executive director of Ophiomics, and is committed to translate the latest advances in Genomic and Bioinformatics research to improve clinical practice and patient care.

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Dr. Joana Cardoso Vaz has an MSc in Human Genetics from the School of Medicine of the University of Lisbon (Portugal), and a PhD in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Leiden (Netherlands). During her PhD research she specialised in cancer genomics, with a focus on colo-rectal cancer. As a post doctoral fellow she worked at the Instituto de Medicina Molecular and at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência using genomics technologies (NGS, microarrays, qPCR) to study mechanism and markers of cancer progression (Breast, Liver and Oesophageal Cancer). Her frequent and abundant interaction with medical doctors from different specialities (oncologist, pathologists, etc.) give her a broad view about real clinical needs, and her experience in cancer genomics enables her to identify analytical solution to those needs . She is a founder and the Scientific and Technical Director of Ophiomics.

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