Alexandre Almeida

Alex has specialized throughout his career in the development and application of bioinformatics and genomic approaches to make biological discoveries with relevance to human health. He first obtained his Bachelor's and Master's degree at the University of Porto in the fields of Biochemistry and Forensic Genetics. Later, he undertook a PhD in Microbiology at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, where he studied the opportunistic pathogen group B Streptococcus to identify genomic traits linked to host adaptation. Using comparative genomics methods, he contributed to the identification of bacterial genes and mutations linked to disease incidence and progression.

After his PhD, he was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship by the European Bioinformatics Institute and relocated to Cambridge to expand his research to genomic studies of the human gut microbiome. Through the use of large-scale computational methods, his work led to the discovery of thousands of uncultivated bacterial species in the human gut microbiome, more than tripling the number of gut-associated species previously known. He has also been involved in a number of national and international collaborative projects, one of which led to the discovery of over 140,000 distinct viruses in the human gut microbiome, of which 50% were unknown before.

Since 2022, he has established a new research team at the Department of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Cambridge, funded by a Career Development Award by the Medical Research Council, to understand the role that the hidden, uncultured microbiome plays in human health and disease.