Tiago Ferreira Leão

I completed my bachelor's degree in Biotechnology at the Federal University of Pará in 2014. Throughout a significant part of my undergraduate studies, I was a scientific initiation scholarship holder in Prof. Paula Schneider's laboratory, where I began my studies in genomics, phylogenetics, and molecular biology. As part of my academic journey, I experienced a year of exchange at the University of Michigan, supported by the Science Without Borders Scholarship from the CAPES Foundation. During this period, I interned in Prof. David Sherman's laboratory, sparking my interest in natural product research. Upon returning to Brazil, I decided to apply to Ph.D. programs that would allow me to apply genomics in the search for new natural products. Consequently, I pursued my Ph.D. in Marine Biology at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), once again benefiting from the Science Without Borders Scholarship from the CAPES Foundation. In the laboratory of professors William and Lena Gerwick, located at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD, I developed new pipelines and tools to understand and explore marine strains rich in natural products, such as the Moorena genus of cyanobacteria. Subsequently, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Pieter Dorrestein's laboratory (UCSD, Skaggs School of Pharmacy), focusing on connecting different data types to the GNPS metabolomics tool. Specifically, I explored algorithms to link biosynthetic gene cluster (BGC) groupings to their corresponding natural products. I continued my postdoctoral research at the Center for Nuclear Energy in Agriculture (University of São Paulo, USP), progressing with the integration of genomics and metabolomics. In this new context, I directed my efforts towards the study of Brazilian cyanobacteria, aiming to deepen the understanding of the interaction between their genomes and metabolites. Additionally, I completed the development of the multi-omics tool, NPOmix. Recently, I served as a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Bioassays, Biosynthesis, and Ecophysiology of Natural Products (NuBBE) at the Institute of Chemistry, São Paulo State University, located in Araraquara. In this setting, my focus was on developing new AI tools for studying bioactive compounds derived from plants and fungi. Since July 2024, I entered the Vale Institute of Technology for Sustainable Development, working with bioinformatics for the analyses of metabarcoding and for generating reference genomes of eukaryotes. (Source: Lattes Curriculum)