Dr. Monah Abou Alezz is a senior bioinformatician and postdoctoral researcher at the San Raffaele Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy (TIGET) in Milan, Italy, with a specialized focus in computational biology, gene and cell therapy. He is a member of TIGET’s Bioinformatics Core and actively contributes to the institute’s high-impact research in two specialized units:
- Retrovirus-Host Interactions and Innate Immunity in Gene Therapy, under the leadership of Prof. Anna Kajaste-Rudnitski, for investigating host immune responses to viral vectors.
- Human Hematopoietic Development and Disease Modeling, directed by Prof. Andrea Ditadi, where his work is dedicated to advancing computational methods for studying hematopoietic development and genetic disease modeling.
Dr. Abou Alezz specializes in designing and implementing data pipelines for analyzing large-scale genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic and metabolomic datasets, with a focus on identifying genetic biomarkers and optimizing therapeutic targets. He brings a strong proficiency in programming languages such as Bash, Python and R, as well as in bioinformatics tools and cloud platforms essential for high-throughput data analysis. Known for his exceptional ability to collaborate across multi-disciplinary teams and communicate complex findings to both technical and non-technical researchers, Dr. Abou Alezz also demonstrates significant leadership in project management and mentoring junior scientists.
With a Ph.D. in Genetics, Molecular, and Cellular Biology from the University of Pavia, Dr. Abou Alezz holds a strong foundation in Genetics and Molecular Biology field in addition to Bioinformatics. His doctoral research, conducted at the Computational Biology Unit of the Institute of Molecular Genetics Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza - National Research Council, focused on characterizing the genomic and splicing dynamics of long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) under the mentorship of Prof. Silvia Bione. During this time, he developed innovative bioinformatics tools for gene annotation analysis, addressing pivotal challenges in gene function prediction and splicing regulation.
Additionally, Dr. Abou Alezz is a certified instructor and lesson maintainer for The Carpentries organization, where he teaches coding and data science skills in workshops across Europe and the United States.
Current Interests and Projects:
- gene and cell therapy innovation and optimization
- disease modeling using computational and statistical approaches
- advanced data interpretation and statistical analysis for multi-omics integration
- development of bioinformatics workflows for various single-cell analyses
- machine learning applications for predictive modeling in genomics and therapeutic response
- data pipeline automation for reproducible and scalable analyses
- data visualization techniques for high-dimensional biological datasets
- promoting coding and data science education through workshops and curriculum design across Europe and the United States