Interests

Broadly my areas of interest cover the prediction of the properties of biological systems, the use and developpment of machine learning methods applied to bioinformatics.
I am currently working on mixing informations describing proteins at a global level to the one decribing their core components the amino-acids, in order to predict structural and chemical properties of these proteins. I especially fancy Support Vector Machines and the engineering of ad-hoc Mercer kernels for the integration of various kinds of information in the learning process.

Research experience

Current situation (starting December 2010): Postdoctoral associate at the UMR-S775, Director Pierre Laurent Puig
Topic: Prediction of patient's response to therapeutic treatments.

January 2006 March 2010: Research fellow in the Machine Learning and Neural Network group of the university of Florence (Italy), under the supervision of Paolo Frasconi.
Topic: Prediction of the chemical modifications of amino-acids combining local sequence and whole protein features.

May 2008 August 2008: Internship in the Hirst Group of Nottingham University (U.K),under the supervision of Prof. Jonathan Hirst.
Topic: Protein features to improve the predictions of Zinc binding and Phosphorylated residues.

2005-2006: 9 month master internship in the Systems Biology group of Pasteur Institute (Paris, France), under the supervision of Prof. Benno Schwikowski.
Topic: Development of a Cytoscape plugin for the intuitive visualisation of protein-protein networks.

2004-2005: 9 month master internship in the inserm unit 567 of Cochin Institute (Paris, France), under the supervision of Claire Francastel.
Topic: Centromeric transcripts and hematopoietic differentiation.

2003-2004: 6 month master internship in "Institut du fer à moulin" (Paris, France), under the supervision of Christel Lutz.
Topic: Activation of Stat proteins by Alk receptor.

Education

2006-2010: PhD in the Systems and Informatics graduate school (University of Florence, Italy).
2005-2006: M.Sc. Bioinformatics (Paris 7 University, France).
2004-2005: M.Sc. Cell Physiology (Paris 7 University, France).
2000-2004: B.Sc. Cell Biology and Physiology (Paris 6 University, France).

Skills

Talks and Publications

GWA studies, statistical learning and Group-Lasso. Paris, MAP5 workgroup (March 11 2011)

Ph.D thesis: Machine Learning Applied To The Prediction Of Amino-acids Properties: study of relevant features and design of Ad-hoc Mercer kernels. Thesis Defence in Florence, Italy (March 3 2010)

Improving prediction of phosphoacceptor sites using global protein descriptors. MALIOB, Turin Italy (January 17 2009)

BMC bioinformatics: A simplified approach to disulfide connectivity prediction from protein sequences.

Using domain, Function and Interaction data to enhance local residue property predictions. Mini Euro CBBM, Rome, Italy (August 8 2008)

CK2 phosphoacceptor sites prediction. EURO XXII, Prague, Czech Republic (July 8 2007)

Friends

Computer Science and Machine Learning

Systems Biology