Renata Carmona e Ferreira

Bachelor's in Biology from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (2002) and PhD in Microbiology, Immunology and Parasitology from the Federal University of São Paulo (2007). Post-Doctoral in Infectology (2009 - 2012) at Federal University of São Paulo and Post-doctorate in Neuroscience by Penn State University (2014 - 2016). Currently, I'm Chief Scientific Officer at Epigene. The main goal of my research is to understand the evolutionary dynamics and the molecular mechanisms that control the expression of eukaryotic genes through genomic data analysis, transcriptomic and epigenomics. I work in this field since my doctorate and had the opportunity to make contributions in basic research: (1) a mathematical model of the dynamics of expression of individual genes that show minimal noise does not correspond to genes following a strictly deterministic dynamics; (2) the discovery that the intragenic recombination is a fundamental mechanism for determining the allelic diversity hybrid strains of Trypanosoma cruzi; (3) and the genomic trypanosomatides and (4) the first experimental demonstration in mammalian retina that HDAC1 is an essential epigenetic regulator of the transition from progenitor cells to terminally differentiated photoreceptors and clinical research (5) a PCR-based method real-time TaqMan MGB assay using mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) targets, which identify precisely the three species of Candida parapsilosis species complex. I am currently working on molecular mechanisms that control the expression of genes in ALS with focus on genomic and epigenomic data. I am also studying the genomic variations found in monozygotic twins discordant for Narcolepsy type 1 that may explain the differences found in the phenotype of these individuals. (Source: Lattes Curriculum)