Dr. Rafael Cuadrat

Dr. Rafael Cuadrat

Bioinformatician, 15 years of experience working on genomics, evolution, metagenomics, RNAseq, variant calling, metabarcoding. Fluent in Python, Ruby, R with some experience with Perl and SQL. Currently working with omics data for molecular epidemiology.

About me

I’m a Brazilian scientist, born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, currently living in Berlin. I got a bachelor degree in Biomedicine from Federal University of Rio de Janeiro State (UNIRIO) in 2007, and a Masters in Cellular and Molecular Biology from Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (FIOCRUZ) in 2010. In 2014 I got my doctorate degree in Computational and System Biology from Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (FIOCRUZ). During my doctorate I witnessed the growth of Next Generating Sequencing (NGS), working with sequenced ocean metagenomes (pyrosequencing) and studying the potential of secondary metabolism of aquatic microorganisms.

In 2015 I was granted with an international postdoc fellowship and moved to Berlin, where I worked at the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB), in collaboration with The Berlin Center for Genomics in Biodiversity Research (BeGenDiv).

In 2017 I moved to Cologne, where I worked at the bioinformatics core facility from the Max Plank Institute for Biology of Ageing (MPI-AGE) for 2 years.

From 2019 to 2020 I worked at the German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rebrucke (DIfE) in the Department of Molecular Epidemiology (MEP), trying to better understand the influence of the gut microbiome on cardiometabolic diseases on EPIC-POTSDAM cohort study. I’m involved in several projects from the department but also external collaborations and side projects, including the study of the antibiotic resistome in oceans (ResistomeDB) and in the human microbiome (work in progress). I’m also investigating the influence of the nasopharyngeal microbiome in the severity of COVID-19.

From December of 2020 to May 2021 I worked as Bioinformatics Scientis in the Bioinformatics and Omics Data Science group from the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology (BIMSB) at Max Delbrück Center (MDC).

Currently I’m a System Biology Scientist at Eagle Genomics.

Since my bachelor thesis, studying parasite protozoa genomes, I always had a passion for the microbiological world and its relation to human health.