Viola Fanfani

Viola Fanfani

A Computational Biologist who loves books, movies and theatre. And bakes sometimes.

Benvenuti!

I am a postdoc at the Harvard School of Public Health and I am a member of the Quackenbush Lab at the department of Biostatistics. I am working on computational biology for cancer research. In particular I am developing models and methods to improve our understanding of the mechanisms underpinning cancer risk and development by focusing on the regulatory changes that happen during cancer progression. I got my PhD at the University of Edinburgh, with Dr. Giovanni Stracquadanio. For my thesis I used statistical methods to decode hidden tumour mechanism and patterns by integrating high-throughput omic experiments and large publicly available resources. Overall, I am trying to understand biology through fancy machine learning , but I also know the power of linear regression!

Topics:Gene Regulatory Networks,cancer progression heritability, cancer networks, graph neural networks, gene expression, pathway analysis, Bayesian statistics, graph analysis.


News

  • BONOBO is out on Genome Research!. DOI: 10.1101/gr.279117.124

  • I am now a postdoc at Harvard School of Public Health!

  • BAGHERA is finally on Cancer Research! Check out the OnlineFirst version of “The landscape of the heritable cancer genome” doi: 10.1158/0008-5472.CAN-20-3348

  • Pygna is out! Check the manuscript on BMC Bioinformatics:https://doi.org/10.1186/s12859-020-03801-1

  • Very excited to announce my first first-author publication! Fanfani, Viola, et al. “Dissecting the heritable risk of breast cancer: from statistical methods to susceptibility genes.” Seminars in Cancer Biology. Academic Press, 2020. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.semcancer.2020.06.001

  • I am excited to be participating into the upcoming “The Biology of Genomes” Virtual Meeting, 5 - 8 May. I’ll also be presenting my poster: Decoding cancer risk in the broader population with gene-level heritability.

  • I am taking part into the Reading Club about graph neural networks organised by Dr. Dimitri Ognibene. Check it out and join us for a chat!