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Dr Camila Gazolla Volpiano

BTech Biotechnology, Federal University of Paraná, Brazil | MSc & PhD, Federal University Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Dr Camila Gazolla Volpiano

Cambridge Baker Systems Genomics Initiative

 

Adjunct Research Associate, Monash University

Honorary Fellow, The University of Melbourne

Postdoctoral Microbial Bioinformatician

+61 401 485 617

Camila grew up in the South Region of Brazil and began undergraduate studies in Biotechnology at the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR) in 2012. Within her first months on campus, she joined a microbiology wet lab working on plant growth-promoting bacteria. She went on to complete an MSc (2017) and PhD (2021) in Genetics and Molecular Biology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (PPGBM/UFRGS), the country’s oldest and one of the most recognised postgraduate programmes in the field.

At UFRGS, Camila worked with the SEMIA Culture Collection (>1200 agriculturally important bacterial strains used as plant inoculants that underpin Brazil’s successful crop-inoculation programme) and shifted decisively into computational biology, focusing on bacterial genomics. During her PhD, she secured support from the U.S. Department of Energy’s GEBA-IV initiative to sequence the collection’s common-bean strain subset.

From 2019 to 2022, Camila co-founded and co-led Agrega Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento em Biotecnologia, building workflows for (meta)genomics and (meta)barcoding analysis and securing competitive innovation grants, before returning to curiosity-driven research. In 2022, she moved to New York (USA) as a postdoctoral fellow at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and in 2023 she was recruited to the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne (Australia) to work with Dr Guillaume Méric, where she now studies links between the human microbiome and health in large, deeply phenotyped cohorts.

Her recent work spans three main projects:

  1. Investigating how past infections predispose individuals to non-communicable diseases by exploring data from multiple population-based cohorts.
  2. Characterising the ecological diversity and clinical associations of human gut archaea.
  3. Exploring bacterial diversity and strain persistence in the infant respiratory microbiome over the first year of life.

Camila also holds honorary appointments with The University of Melbourne and Monash University, and maintains active collaborations across the UK, Finland, Sweden and Austria.

Grants

  • Services based on the taxonomy and genomics of microorganisms. Funder: FAPERGS, Programa Centelha 2019. Role: Lead co‑PI
  • Microfluidic molecular method for rapid prediction and diagnosis of antibiotic resistance. Funder: FAPERGS / CNPq / SEBRAE, Programa Doutor Empreendedor 2019. Role: Lead co‑PI
  • Agrega Biome Solo: AI for predicting agricultural productivity from chemical and microbiome data. Funder: FAPERGS, Programa TECHFUTURO 2020. Role: Lead co‑PI

Awards

  • ECS Miller Grant, Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute (2024)
  • Best Poster, Melbourne Emerging Leaders in Biomedical Research Symposium (2024)
  • Prêmio Pesquisador Gaúcho (“Gaúcho Researcher Award”), Innovative Startup Category for Agrega given by the Research Support Foundation of the Rio Grande do Sul State (2021)
  • 1st place (Doctorate), Productivity Award for Master and Doctoral students at PPGBM/UFRGS (2020)
  • 2nd Place (Doctorate), Productivity Award for Master and Doctoral students at PPGBM/UFRGS (2019)
  • 2nd Place (Doctorate), Productivity Award for Master and Doctoral students at PPGBM/UFRGS (2019)
  • Reginaldo da Silva Romeiro Award (best postgraduate work), II Latin American Symposium on Biostimulants and IX ReBIRPP (2018)
  • 2nd Place (Doctorate), Productivity Award for Master and Doctoral students at PPGBM/UFRGS (2018)

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