Education

B.S.: University of Buenos Aires, Argentina
Ph.D.: University of Buenos Aires, Argentina
Postdoctoral: National Institutes of Health, USA

Previous Positions

• Research Assistant, Department of Biological Chemistry, School of Pharmacy and Biochemistry, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina (1992-1996)
• Postdoctoral Fellow. Laboratory of Dr. Juan S. Bonifacino, Cell Biology and Metabolism Branch, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, NIH, MD (2001-2005)
• Research Assistant Professor, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular & Cell Biology, GUMC (2005-2009)
• Research Assistant Professor. Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, Department of Computer and Information Sciences, UD (2009-2012)
• Research Associate Professor. Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, Department of Computer and Information Sciences, UD (2012-2024)

Honors, Professional Appointments and Activities

Honors

• Recognized as a “Highly Cited Researcher” (top 1%) by Thomson Reuters/Clarivate Analytics (2019, 2020)
• Travel expenses to chair the PIR workshop at Plant and Animal Genome XVIII meeting (2010, 2011)
• National Institutes of Health Visiting Fellowship (2003 – 2005)
• PEW Trust Latin American Fellowship for the Biomedical Sciences (2001 – 2003)

Other Experience and Professional Memberships

• Ad hoc reviewer, scientific journals such as BMC Bioinformatics, BMC genomics, PeerJ, Proteomics, J Proteomics Bioinformatics, PloS, Nucleic Acids Research, Immunology, Faculty1000, 2004-present
• Member, PIR Executive Board, 2010-present
• Member, Scientific and organizing committee of BioCreative series BioCreative III to VII, and organizer of text mining session at ISB 2010, 2012 and ISB 2015, 2010-present
• External grant reviewer, Swiss Science Foundation, 2013
• Course Director of BCHB521 Bioinformatics at GUMC, 2013-2014
• Member, Editorial Board of Database: The Journal of Biological Databases and Curation, 2014-present
• Member, Executive Board of the International Society for Biocuration (Chair in 2018), 2015-2018
• External grant reviewer, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, 2016
• Member (Chair 2019-2021), Faculty Library Senate Committee at University of Delaware, 2017-2021
• Co-Editor, Book Protein Bioinformatics: From Protein Modifications and Networks to Proteomics. Methods in Molecular Biology 1558 (2017)., 2017
• Director of e-learning course BIOINF644 Introduction to Bioinformatics at UD, 2017-present
• External reviewer ELIXIR French node, 2018
• Co-Chair, Text mining session (2018-2019) and text mining COSI (2020-2023) at ISMB, 2018-2023
• Member, Advisory Board for Europe PubMed Central, 2019-present
• Member, Coordinating Committee on Education at University of Delaware, 2019-2021
• Member, Instructional Computing and Research Support Committee, 2021-2022
• Member, Open and Affordable Teaching Materials working group, 2021-2022
• Member, Advisory Board for HGNC, 2021-present

Research interest

I am a full-time instructor contributing to the educational programs at the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. My primary research interest lies in the precise representation of protein information—including sequence, evolution, function, post-translational modifications, and pathways—in a manner that is both human- and machine-readable, facilitating hypothesis generation. I have extensive experience working within international and interdisciplinary consortia, including UniProt, where I led the curation group and text-mining efforts at PIR; the Protein Ontology project, where I led the curation team and organized workshops; and BioCreative.

My group’s activities have encompassed:
(i) Database curation and bibliographic mapping for UniProtKB
(ii) Proteoform curation for the Protein Ontology
(iii) Development and evaluation of natural language processing tools—collaborating with the text-mining group and Dr. Vijay Shanker—to enhance the retrieval of gene, protein, and miRNA-related information
(iv) Providing bioinformatics and text-mining support to various research groups

Publications

Full list of publications available here.

Projects I contributed

• UniProt: https://www.uniprot.org/
• BioCreative
• iTextMine: https://research.bioinformatics.udel.edu/itextmine/integrate
• iPTMnet: https://research.bioinformatics.udel.edu/iptmnet/
• emiRIT: https://research.bioinformatics.udel.edu/emirit/
• Incorporating image-based features into biomedical document classification