Damiano Fantini

Dr. Fantini is a Medical Biotechnologist with a strong background in cellular and molecular biology and extensive expertise in Data Mining and Genomic Data Analysis. He is currently working as postdoctoral researcher in the areas of DNA Repair and Cancer Research at Northwestern University, Feinberg School of Medicine (Chicago, IL, USA). He earned his Ph.D. degree in “Biomedical and Biotechnological Sciences” from University of Udine (Udine, ITALY) in 2010 and has been conducting research aimed at dissecting the biology of human cancer ever since, with a focus on the analysis of processes leading to accumulation of cancer somatic mutations and genetic instability. 

As postdoc, Dr. Fantini worked in world-reputed institutions, including the french “Atomic Energy Commission” (CEA, Fontenay-aux-Roses, France), “University of Illinois at Chicago” (UIC, Chicago, IL) and currently “Northwestern University” (NU, Chicago, IL) since June 2016. Dr. Fantini’s research is documented by 10 scientific peer-reviewed articles (5 first-author research articles), and a total of more than 350 article citations. 

In the last 5 years, Dr. Fantini has actively contributed to develop open-source software for biomedical data retrieval and analysis, mainly written in R, and made it available to the scientific community via The Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) or other freely accessible repositories (GitHub). Dr. Fantini’s R packages include mutSignatures (perform non-negative matrix factorization on genomic mutation data from cancer samples), easyPubMed (a simple R interface to the NIH Entrez/PubMed database to download and process large volumes of PubMed records), and TCGAretriever (an easy-to-use interface for accessing and analyzing open-access genomic and clinical data from the cBioPortal Genomics repository).