Juan Cristobal Vera

Cris started his professional life as a geneticist-in-training at Pennsylvania State University, but soon switched to the computational side. His dissertation research explored the bioinformatics and functional transcriptomics of non-model insect populations. After graduating he joined Leidos Biomedical as a bioinformatics analyst attached to the genomics core at the National Cancer Institute Frederick National Laboratory. He worked mostly in the development of methods to elucidate the viral integration mechanisms involved in cancer genomics. He then became a bioinformatics scientist at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. There he designed next generation sequencing bioinformatic pipelines to investigate the evolutionary genomics of Pseudomonas aeruginosa/phage interactions within immune-compromised patients and flu infection heterogeneity at the individual cell level.