Dr. Gregorio Iraola

Gregorio is a Uruguayan computational microbiologist who applies next-generation sequencing and bioinformatics to investigate evolutionary patterns of human and animal bacterial pathogens, in order to understand human microbiome variability and assess the role of the environment in antimicrobial resistance dissemination. He is committed to building research capabilities in Latin America through the implementation of collaborative networks in microbial genomics and bioinformatics in the region. He is currently Head of the Microbial Genomics Laboratory at the Pasteur Institute of Montevideo in Uruguay, and an International Adjunct Professor at the Center for Integrative Biology of the Universidad Mayor of Santiago de Chile in Chile.

He worked as an Associate Investigator in the Bioinformatics Unit of the Pasteur Institute Montevideo until 2018, before being promoted as a Junior Group Leader to create the Microbial Genomics Laboratory that he currently directs. He has also been a visiting worker at the Wellcome Sanger Institute since 2015, developing several projects in collaboration with Dr. Trevor Lawley in the Host-Microbiota Interactions Laboratory. These projects have included whole-genome sequencing of global pathogen collections and analysis of human microbiome data, for example, to discover underappreciated carriage of opportunistic bacteria such as Campylobacter fetus in healthy gut microbiota, or to provide epidemiological insights into Clostridium difficile dynamics in Latin America.

Currently, as an international fellow of the Wellcome Sanger Institute, he leads Latinbiota, a continental initiative to characterize the gut microbiome of healthy populations of urban, rural, and native origin in different countries in Latin America.