Biography

Guillermo Rangel-Pineros is a microbiologist and a bioinformatician from Colombia, who has experience in bacteriophage biology, microbial genomics, and metagenomics. Guillermo has a bachelor and a master’s degree in microbiology from “Universidad de los Andes” in Colombia, and a PhD degree in genetics and genome biology from the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom. During his PhD, Guillermo studied the biology, ecology and genomics of bacteriophages that target Streptococcus pneumoniae, the main cause of bacterial pneumonia worldwide. Guillermo received his PhD in 2019 and shortly afterwards he did a secondment at the EMBL-EBI, where he worked in the development of VIRify, a pipeline for the taxonomic profiling of viral communities in metagenomic datasets, which is integrated with the EMBL-EBI’s metagenomic analysis resource MGnify. Guillermo then joined the Computational Biodiscovery group at KU’s Globe Institute to work on the development of a network-based strategy that supports the comparison of hundreds of thousands of bacteriophage genomes and the visualization of clusters of closely related genomes. This approach demonstrated great potential to hasten the discovery and characterization of novel bacteriophages, solely based on the analysis of their genome sequences. Guillermo has recently started a new postdoc position on the ArcHives project, where he will be developing analysis pipelines for the analysis of metagenomics and proteomics data collected from wax seals.