Background:
Nuno graduated in Technologic Physics Engineering from Instituto Superior Tecnico (Lisbon, Portugal) in 2000.
He completed a Graduate Program in Biophysics and Biomedical Engineering at IBEB, Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon in 2001.
He then did his PhD in Biomedical Sciences at the Institute of Molecular Medicine / University of Lisbon Medical School with Professor Maria do Carmo Fonseca. Most of the PhD research actually took place at the University of Cambridge with Dr. Samuel Aparicio. He also visited the lab of Juan Valcarcel at EMBL for a few months in 2002. His PhD work involved bioinformatics studies on the complexity of splicing and gene expression.
Nuno was a postdoctoral member of the Computational Biology Group from the University of Cambridge, led by Professor Simon Tavaré and based at the CRUK Cambridge Research Institute, from 2006 to July 2010. His main research in the Computational Biology Group was focused on understanding the complexity of gene expression regulation and its impact on disease mechanisms, namely oncogenesis.
Nuno has been interested in the systems-level transcriptional mechanisms underlying mammalian cell specification (often perturbed in carcinomas). In particular, he has been collaborating with the Odom Group in determining the molecular mechanisms responsible for the stability of transcriptional programs by decoupling the relative contributions of cis and trans effects on histone mark patterning, transcription factor binding, and gene expression, as well as studying the regulation of lineage-specific retrotransposons and repeat elements. Such work involves the analysis, annotation and integration of different sorts of array and sequence information.
Motivated by examples of resemblance between mammalian alternative splicing and gene duplication in teleosts, Nuno is particularly interested in unveiling the features shared by the transcription and splicing regulatory circuitries, thereby shedding some light on the mechanisms responsible for the association between aberrant splicing and cancer. His efforts include studies on the evolution of splicing factors, the RNA binding of splicing factors, and the expression profiling of splicing factors in myogenesis (mostly in collaboration with the Carmo-Fonseca lab, based at the Institute of Molecular Medicine in Lisbon).
Nuno was involved in the identification of the most important issues in the analysis of BeadChip information, namely by performing the complete transcriptomic and genomic reannotation of probe sequences, as the original annotation is shown to bias the interpretation of cancer data. This is part of a general pipeline for microarray probe reannotation. Nuno's efforts have also contributed for the development of several microarray-related methodologies.
Nuno has collaborated with Dr Roger Palmer in the study of global gene expression patterns in pediatric malignant germ cell tumours. He has also contributed with microarray annotation and sequence analysis for several breast cancer research studies, such as determining molecular classifiers (with the Caldas lab) and risk-associated SNPs (with the Ponder lab).
Nuno joined the Blencowe Lab in August 2010. He is involved in the analysis of mRNA-seq data for the inference of tissue and species specific alternative splicing patterns. He has been awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and a Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship.
Curriculum Vitae
PUBLICATIONS (by topic)
Scientific and academic interaction with Portugal
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