Renato is a PhD student in Biostatistics and Health Informatics, focusing on investigating the role of the gut-brain axis in motor cell disorders through advanced bioinformatics approaches. His research, supervised by Dr Alfredo Iacoangeli and Professor Ammar Al-Chalabi, within the EPSRC DRIVE-Health programme, combines metagenomics, metabolomics, and clinical data to understand disease progression in Motor Neurone Disease (MND) and Spinal and Bulbar Muscular Atrophy (SBMA). Renato holds a BSc in Biomedical Science from King’s College London and an MSc in Genomic Medicine from Imperial College London. With extensive industry experience, he has worked as a Bioinformatician at BGI Genomics, where he developed high-performance computing pipelines for genomic analysis. His recent work as a Research Assistant at King’s College London involves benchmarking Oxford Nanopore Long-Read Sequencing technologies. Previously, at the University of Westminster, he contributed to developing bioinformatics pipelines for variant imputation and polygenic risk score calculation.