Pedro Pereira

I'm a Bioinformatician / Biostatistician at the Department of Neurology of the Helsinki University Hospital, and I'm concurrently located as a Visiting Scholar at the DNA Sequencing and Genomics Laboratory of the Institute of Biotechnology (University of Helsinki), where I originally made my PhD in Genetics (with a focus on Bioinformatics and Statistics). I'm currently working with shotgun metagenomics and other 'omics data in a medical context.

I have wide-ranging interests. When possible, I like to approach research from a multidisciplinary perspective. My background in Geology (Environmental Geology, Geotechnics, Engineering Geology, Land Use Planning, Environmental Impact Assessment, Geological Risk Assessment, Coastal Processes) and Biology (Genetics, Molecular Biology, Microbiology, Microbial Ecology), as well as experience with a wide range of techniques and methods in wet-lab and data analysis, puts me in a unique position to tackle a wide variety of multidisciplinary research topics.

So far, my main research focus has been on the human microbiome in health & disease, for which I now do mostly statistical data analysis. I did my PhD thesis on the human microbiome in Parkinson's Disease and Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis, but I'm involved in several other biomedical projects as well. I've worked with the skin, oral, nasal, gut, and bile microbiomes in the context of various diseases and medical conditions. An entire project pipeline, from DNA/RNA isolation, DNA/RNA library creation, and DNA/RNA sequencing, to bioinformatic processing of the raw sequence data and data analysis is completely done in-house at our lab, allowing us to fully control the project pipeline from beginning to end.

Ph.D. in Genetics, University of Helsinki, 2017

M.Sc. in Geology, University of Lisbon, 2005