ERC: Davide Risso

Davide Risso is an accomplished statistician and bioinformatician, currently serving as Associate Professor in the Department of Statistical Sciences at the University of Padova. His interdisciplinary research focuses on developing statistical methodologies and open-source software for the analysis of genomic and transcriptomic data, with a particular emphasis on single-cell and spatial transcriptomics data. After his PhD at Padova, Risso worked as a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, laying foundations for RNA-seq data analysis. He then held a tenure-track position at Weill Cornell Medicine before returning to Italy in 2018 as an Assistant Professor at Padova, supported by the prestigious "Rita Levi Montalcini" fellowship for researchers working abroad. Risso was promoted to Associate Professor in 2021. His group develops statistical models and machine learning algorithms for spatial transcriptomics and single-cell data analysis, with applications in oncology, neurobiology and precision medicine. He has pioneered methods for normalization and removal of unwanted technical effects, still widely used today. With over 50 publications in leading journals, Risso's work has been recognized with the Web of Science "Highly Cited Researcher" award in 2021 and 2022. He is actively involved in open-source software development within the Bioconductor project, serving on its Technical Advisory Board. Risso is committed to education, he teaches biostatistics and bioinformatics courses and serves as the Director of the Master's program in Omics Data Analysis. His interdisciplinary expertise bridges statistics, bioinformatics and computational biology