Dr. Gregorio Iraola is a computational microbiologist. His posgraduation studies started with a Master in Bioinformatics before obtaining a PhD in Biology focused on microbial genomics at the University of the Republic and the Institut Pasteur Montevideo in Uruguay. Since 2017 he is a staff Associate Researcher at the Bioinformatics Unit in the Institut Pasteur Montevideo. Also, since 2015 he has been a visitor scientist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the Institut Pasteur Paris. From Uruguay, he leads several research lines aiming to develop and apply computational approaches for studying the microbial world. His work has been focused on understanding the evolution of viruses that affect livestock and pets using phylodynamics; and fundamentally on uncovering the evolutionary forces shaping the genomes of zoonotic bacteria like Campylobacter, Leptospira and Mycobacterium. Among his ongoing projects stands out a joint Latin American effort to study the population dynamics of Clostridium difficile using genomic epidemiology approaches. Recently, he became interested in complementing his work in pathogenomics with microbiome approaches, specifically by applying city-scale metagenomics to analyse antibiotic resistance dynamics in enterobacteria from urban environments. More recently, he got involved in science communication as a columnist aiming to bring microbiology and genomics closer to the society.
