On Tuesday January 19th, 2016 at 10.30 am, in room D.2.6, within the course "Bioinformatics and Computational Biology", on the Genomic Computing topic, Laura Riva, Computational Cancer Genomics and System Biology Group, Center for Genomic Science of IIT@SEMM (Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia - IIT, Milan), will give the seminar: "Studying the genome and the epigenome using next generation sequencing".

The seminar will introduce the principles behind Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) and the bioinformatics challenges connected with the analysis of NGS data. It will introduce several applications of NGS to study the genome and the epigenome, and it will present some recently published data to show how the use of NGS technologies has already had a profound impact on our understanding of cancer genomics. Indeed, NGS data can help us to characterize different tumor samples, in terms of their somatic mutations, transcriptional changes and methylation patterns. It will also explain how the study of cancer genomics can pave the way for precision medicine for the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.

Laura Riva obtained a Master degree in Biomedical Engineering in 2001 and a PhD degree in Bioengineering in 2007 from the Politecnico di Milano. Her PhD thesis was developed in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) thanks to the Roberto Rocca doctoral Fellowship. From July 2007 to July 2010, she was a Postdoc in the department of Biological Engineering at MIT working on computational and systems biology. Thanks to the reintegration Marie Curie fellowship, she came back to Italy and worked as a Postdoctoral fellow at the European Institute of Oncology till the end of 2011. Since 2012, she is a team leader at the Center for Genomic Science of IIT@SEMM in Milan, where she leads the computational cancer genomics and systems biology group. She is author of 17 peer reviewed international papers and of one international patent.