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Leonardo
Collado Torres
,
PhD

Assistant Professor
Leo's wide profile picture

Departmental Affiliations

Primary

Contact Info

855 N. Wolfe St. , Office 385
Baltimore
Maryland
21205
US        

Research Interests

At the Lieber Institute for Brain Development (LIBD), our group works on understanding the roots and signatures of disease (particularly psychiatric disorders) by zooming in across dimensions of gene activity. We achieve this by studying gene expression at all expression feature levels (genes, exons, exon-exon junctions, and un-annotated regions) and by using different gene expression measurement technologies (bulk RNA-seq, single cell/nucleus RNA-seq, and spatial transcriptomics) that provide finer biological resolution and localization of gene expression. We work closely with collaborators from LIBD as well as from Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and other institutions, which reflects the cross-disciplinary approach and diversity in expertise needed to further advance our understanding of high throughput biology.

In order to provide a supportive and stimulating research environment at LIBD, our group provides Data Science guidance sessions open to any LIBD staff member and we organize the LIBD rstats club, among other initiatives. Our documentation book website contains more details for on boarding, how to ask for help, bootcamps, writing papers, authorship, configuration files, and much more.

Check out the content we share

We constantly create new content to share what we are learning or working on, which you might be interested in. In particular, we:

Join the team

If you are interested in joining the R/Bioconductor-powered Team Data Science group, please check our open positions at the LIBD career opportunities website. You might be interested in checking our anonymous team survey results, which highlights some strengths but also some weaknesses and areas we can improve.

If we don’t have any open positions, please reach out to Leonardo with your CV, GitHub/GitLab/etc profile with open-source software, and a short description of why you are interested in our team.

Experiences & Accomplishments
Education
PhD
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
2016
BS
National Autonomous University of Mexico
2009
Overview

At the Lieber Institute for Brain Development (LIBD), I lead the R/Bioconductor-powered Team Data Science group. I am also an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostastics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Additionally, I am interested in outreach activities as a board member of the Community of Bioinformatics Software Developers.

As a quick background, I graduated from the Undergraduate Program on Genomic Sciences from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 2009 and worked for two years at Winter Genomics analyzing high-throughput sequencing data. I then got a PhD in 2016 from the Department of Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health thanks to a CONACyT scholarship. There I worked with Jeff Leek and Andrew Jaffe in developing derfinder and recount. I then worked ~ 4 years as a Staff Scientist and Research Scientist in Andrew Jaffe’s lab on a variety of data analysis projects. I became a principal investigator in September 2020.

Every day I use R and Bioconductor, and on some days I write R packages. Occasionally I write blog posts about them and other tools. I’m a co-founder of the LIBD rstats club and the CDSB community of R and Bioconductor developers in Mexico and Latin America, that we described at the R Consortium website. In the past, I also served on the Bioconductor Community Advisory Board and the advisory board for rOpenSci’s Statistical Software Peer Review.

Honors & Awards

See https://lcolladotor.github.io/cv/#honors for Leo's honors. 

Select Publications

Check https://lcolladotor.github.io/#publications, ORCiD, or Google Scholar for all of Leo's publications including pre-prints.

Projects
See https://lcolladotor.github.io/#projects for Leo's list of projects.