Julio Diaz

 Julio is a bioinformatician with a focus on bacterial genomics, evolutionary biology, and big data.  He obtained his PhD from the Department of Cell and Systems Biology at the University of Toronto.  During his PhD, Julio worked to be better understand the within-patient evolution of infectious bacterial populations in cystic fibrosis lungs.  Here, he combined deep sampling and next generation sequencing with bioinformatics and statistical methods to identify changes in the bacterial population diversity that could be associated with the clinical history of the patient.  After his PhD, Julio joined the Zoology department at the University of Oxford to study bacterial infections in intensive care units across Europe.

 Julio joined CGPS in November 2021 to work on the AMRwatch project.  In this project, he leads the implementation of bioinformatics tools and the development of supporting material for the assembly and analysis of all the genomes of organisms in the WHO pathogen priority list.  He is also interested in training fellow researchers in bioinformatics and bacterial genomics