Laurent Gatto

Question

How to make sense of the vast amounts of data that are generated and how to best generate and use them to study and understand complex biology?

Research focus

Modern biomedical research relies heavily on high throughput omics technologies, that generate large amounts of complex data. These data need to be processed, analysed, integrated and contextualised to comprehend the complexity of the underlying biology. The reliance on these data has transformed biomedical research into data-intensive discipline, and lead some to describe the situation as a data deluge.

The Computational Biology and Bioinformatics focuses on all the aspects of the data pipeline, starting with the consideration of technical and biological factors that will influence the data generation and their interpretation, to the data processing, up to their interpretation, in collaboration with e biomedical and clinical collaborators.

The lab has developed a considerable expertise in the reproducible processing and analyses of quantitative mass spectrometry data, with special emphasis on quantitative spatial proteomics and mass spectrometry-based single-cell proteomics. The CBIO lab research also focuses on integration of different omics modalities, including the use of publicly available datasets, the application and dissemination of open and reproducible research, and the collaborative development of research software development. The lab also hosts the UCLouvain bioinformatics core facility that provides dedicated support for multiple modalities, including bulk, single-cell and spatial transcriptomics.

Since September 2018, Laurent Gatto heads the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Unit the de Duve Institute and is Associate Professor at the UCLouvain. He teaches data science and bioinformatics in the faculty of pharmacy and biomedical sciences. Laurent Gatto is an avid open research advocate, making the research in his lab reproducible and openly available. He is a Software Sustainability Institute fellow, a Data and Software Carpentry instructor, and an affiliated member of the Bioconductor project.

Before joining the UCLouvain, he was a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Biochemistry and Cambridge Centre for Systems Biology, at the University of Cambridge (UK) from 2010 to 2013. Until 2018, he ran the Computational Proteomics Unit as senior post-doctoral researcher. Laurent Gatto obtained his Master's degree in Biology and his PhD in Sciences (2006) from the Free University of Brussels (Belgium), and worked for three years in industry, as a bioinformatics and project manager.

Honors

• EuPA Bioinformatics for Mass Spectrometry Award (2023)
• Bioconductor Community Award (2021)
• Software Sustainability Fellow (2014)

Affiliations

• Group Leader, de Duve Institute
• Full Professor, UCLouvain