My research work, in the context of the DIMEC (Dipartimento Scienze Mediche e Chirurgiche) department, is focused on the application of Machine Learning techniques to various biomedical problems:
- My PhD research aims at contributing to fields related to antibiotic-resistance, vaccine response and epidemiology of infectious diseases. In particular, through a collaboration with the pharmacology department of the university of Bologna, whose clinical operations are set in Sant'Orsola hospital, I focus on pharmacokinetics. Machine Learning could greatly benefit the personalization of the therapies by integrating patient-specific information into the analytical models currently employed. The resulting algorithms are called "hybrid models".
- In collaboration with the department of microbiology of the university of Bologna I develop computer vision tools for the spatial modeling of the populations of macrophages and bacteria in tissues like liver and spleen, in which they develop rich interactions.
- Within my research group, I'm marginally involved also in trascriptomics and metagenomics. In these cases, our tools draw mainly from network medicine and bioinformatics.
I'm also involved in projects aimed at increasing the interdisciplinary skills of the university students of various backgrounds and their awareness about the opportunities they have in the local sociotechnical landscape, bridging companies and academia, with strong focus on the innovation due to Machine Learning, Big Data and HPC.
