Lorenzo Di Rocco

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Computer Science, University of Salerno, where I work on advanced computational methods for genomics, bioinformatics, and precision medicine.

I received my Ph.D. cum laude in Statistical Sciences from Sapienza University of Rome, under the supervision of Prof. Umberto Ferraro Petrillo. My doctoral research focused on the development of scalable and distributed computational frameworks to tackle large-scale challenges in omics data analysis. This work culminated in my Ph.D. thesis, Scalable solutions for large-scale bioinformatics analysis: a critical study of Apache Spark applications in high-performance computational genomics, and resulted in several peer-reviewed publications (see the Publications page).

My research activity began in 2020 within a project on Big Data software services for decision support in Precision Medicine, funded by the European Institute of Innovation & Technology (EIT). During my Ph.D., I specialized in integrating high-performance computing (HPC) and distributed computing paradigms for complex bioinformatics pipelines.

I further strengthened my expertise in HPC by attending specialized training courses at CINECA, which led to the opportunity to serve as Principal Investigator of a Class C ISCRA HPC project, focused on efficient genome inference methods on large-scale pangenome graphs.

As a research visitor with the Genome Data Science Group at Bielefeld University headed by Prof. Dr. Alexander Schönhuth, I gained hands-on experience in applying machine learning and deep learning techniques to model and analyze DNA sequences.

My current research interests include:

• HPC for Computational Genomics and Bioinformatics
• Machine learning and deep learning for Omics Data
• Data-driven Methodologies for Health Informatics and Precision Medicine

An overview of my ongoing research activities is available on the dedicated Projects page.