Dr. Juan Ugalde is a computational microbiologist, specializing in the use of omics approaches to study microbial diversity in different ecosystems. Currently, he is Director of Bioinformatics in the microbiome company uBiome. He obtained his PhD in 2014, from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at the University of California, San Diego, studying the diversity of hypersaline microbial communities using metagenomics approaches. He returned to Chile in 2014, as an Assistant Professor at the Center for Genomics and Bioinformatics, Universidad Mayor. Juan’s research uses genomics, bioinformatics, and data sciences approaches to understand the diversity, evolution, and adaption of microorganism to their environments. Among his work, he has worked in comparative genomic analysis of different microbial groups, including producers of natural products such as Salinispora, Chilean strains of Staphylococcus aureus, among other groups. The last few years he has been active in the field of microbiome studies, taking part in collaborations to understand how the urban microbiome, as well as taking part in several studies of the human microbiome.
