Since 2020, I am Full Professor at the School of Applied Mathematics (EMAp) at FGV in Rio de Janeiro. I obtained my PhD in Computer Science in 2002 from University of Toronto, specializing in Machine Learning under the supervision of Prof. Geoffrey Hinton. Then I was at Yale University, specializing in Computational Biology under Prof. Mark Gerstein.I became a PI in 2006, obtaining a Lecturer position at Royal Holloway University of London, where I started my lab (www.paccanarolab.org). In 2014 I became Full Professor of Machine Learning and Computational Biology and Director of the Centre for Systems and Synthetic Biology, which I co-founded in 2008, in the same University. I am visiting professor at the Catholic University of Asuncion (Paraguay) where I lead an outpost of my lab. I have also been visiting professor/fellow at Cornell, Yale and the University of Venice. I am responsible for several international research projects in the field of Machine Learning applied to Biology and Medicine. I co-direct Research Grants together with academics at Yale University, Cornell University, University of Tennessee and the Catholic University of Asuncion. In 2021 I was awarded Cientista do Nosso Estado project from FAPERJ. Several of my Machine Learning algorithms have been published in Journals such as Nature, Nature Methods, Nature Communications, Cell, PNAS.

Areas of interest: 

• Artificial intelligence
• Computational Biology
• Systems Biology
• Network Medicine
• Systems Pharmacology