My work with Didier Devaurs and Lydia Kavraki on the use of DINC for immunotherapy applications feaured as one of three research projects “Bolstering biomedicine,” at the CASC (Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation) 2021 brochure: “Science at full speed”.
I will give a talk at the seminar series of the Graduate Program in Cellular and Molecular Biology of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (PPGBCM/UFRGS), in March 12.
We launch a webserver for ensemble docking with SARS-CoV-2 proteins, DINC-COVID, allowing users to account for receptor flexibility while testing potential drug-inhibitors. A manuscript describing our methods is currently under review, but a preprint version is available on BioRxiv.
I gave a talk titled “Advancing immunotherapy through structure-based computational analyses” at the Annual Symposioum of the Center for Nuclear Receptor and Cell Signaling (CNRSC). Houston/ZOOM, TX. January 2021.
I started as an Assistant Professor of Computational Biology at the Department of Biology and Biochemistry of the University of Houston. I am also selecting PhD students and Postdocs to work on my team (more here).
2020
Our work was advertised at the Rice University News and Media Relations webpage (see here).
I was selected to represent the CCBTP program during the 30th Annual Keck Research Conference (ARC2020).
I was one of receipients of the 2020 Immuno-Oncology Young Investigators’ Forum (IOYIF) PhD Postdoc Awards.
I was awarded the SCI Gold Oral Presentation Award at the 6th Annual SCI Summer Research Colloquium, hosted by the Applied Physics Program of Rice University.
I wrote about the challenge of misinformation and fake news during the COVID-19 epidemics, for the Brazilian Society of Immunology Blog. The text (in Portuguese) can be found here.
I was interviewed by a local news website from my hometown (Alegrete Tudo), about my experience under quarentine in the USA, and what could Brazil learn from the USA response to COVID-19.
My research, in collaboration with Dr. Didier Devaurs, was featured in a publication at the website of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). The piece describes our use of the Comet supercomputer, at SDSC, to test the use of our meta-docking method (DINC) for predicting the binding modes of large ligands. The long-term goal of this project is to enable applications for personalized cancer immunotherapy.
I wrote an update on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic for the Brazilian Society of Immunology Blog. The text (in Portuguese) can be found here. Updated information on the number of confirmed cases/deaths for Brazil can be found here, and worldwide here.
My lastest abstract, titled “Sequence-based retrieval of potential targets for off-target toxicity in cancer immunotherapy”, was selected for poster presentation at the AMIA 2020 Informatics Summit.
2019
I gave a talk titled “Enabling structure-based data-driven selection of targets for cancer immunotherapy” at the Seventeenth Annual Rocky Mountain Bioinformatics Conference (Rocky19), a meeting of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). Dec 7, 2019, Aspen/Snowmass, CO.
I gave a tutorial on “Current methods and open challenges for structural modeling in cancer immunotherapy” at the First International Symposium on Mathematical and Computational Oncology (ISMCO 2019). October 14, 2019 at Lake Tahoe, Nevada, USA.
I gave a talk titled “Large-scale modeling of class I peptide-HLA complexes using APE-Gen” at the First International Symposium on Mathematical and Computational Oncology (ISMCO 2019). October 15, 2019 at Lake Tahoe, Nevada, USA.
I gave a talk titled “Aplications of structural bioinformatics to cancer immunotherapy” at the XXII Semana Acadêmica da Biologia, Passo Fundo University, Brazil, on September 17, 2019.
I was seleted with honorable mention to be a part of the School of Engineering’s Future Faculty Fellows Program, at Rice University (Houston, TX). The goal of the program is to help fellows to become more competitive for faculty positions, by providing support in preparing all elements of the faculty application and interview.
I was selected to be a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Computational Cancer Biology Training Program (CCBTP). This fellowship is funded by the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT), grant number RP170593. The CCBTP is one of the training programs of the Gulf Coast Consortia for Quantitative Biomedical Sciences (GCC).
