Born in Bologna on 26/05/1995
Education
Currently – PhD Student in Physics at the University of Bologna
2019 – Master’s Degree in Applied Physics, University of Bologna
2017 – Bachelor’s Degree in Physics, University of Bologna
International Experience
2018 – ERASMUS+ Traineeship abroad program at Leeds Institute for Data Analytics, University of Leeds
Research Activity
In the final year of the Bachelor’s degree I grew interested in complex systems and medical physics, which drawn me towards the field of Applied Physics. For the Bachelor’s thesis I dealt with the detection of somatic mutations starting from raw sequencing data. This work gave me the chance to learn how to handle genomic data and to optimally approach their analysis with statistical methods and bioinformatics tools.
Afterwards, throughout the two years of the Master’s degree, I followed up my work on genomic data by modelling single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) with a system of spin-glasses. To do so, I studied feed-forward Neural Networks and I delved into their entropy-based learning algorithms that are rooted in spin glass models. Eventually I focused on the so-called replicated focusing Belief Propagation algorithm (rfBP). With the Master’s thesis I showed the rfBP to be successfully equivalent to several well-known standard Machine Learning methods on a real biological dataset. During the Master’s years I also had the opportunity to learn how to tackle other types of biological data, such as epigenomics and transcriptomics data, and to approach the analysis of biological networks and biomedical images.
The main objective of my PhD research activity is to master the analysis of biomedical data for research and clinical purposes by integrating different types of data: omics data (e.g. genomics, transcriptomics, epigenomics), demographics data (e.g. age, gender, ethnicity), clinical data (e.g. treatment plan, quality of life, biochemical parameters), images (e.g. histopathological, CT, PET), biological networks or known hierarchies (e.g. Protein-Protein Interaction, hematopoietic stem cell hierarchy).
Latest Publications
Dall’Olio, D., Curti, N., Fonzi, E. et al. Impact of concurrency on the performance of a whole exome sequencing pipeline. BMC Bioinformatics 22, 60 (2021).
Curti et al., (2020). rFBP: Replicated Focusing Belief Propagation algorithm. Journal of Open Source Software, 5(54), 2663, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.02663
Lars Bullinger et al. (2020) NOVEL INSIGHTS INTO GENOMIC CLASSIFICATION AND PROGNOSIS IN ACUTE MYELOID LEUKEMIA BASED ON A PAN-EUROPEAN PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP, THE HARMONY ALLIANCE, at 25th Congress of the European Hematology Association Virtual Edition
