Giovanni Ciriello obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2009 from the University of Padova, Italy, and was a visiting scholar during this period at the Georgia Institute of Technology (GeorgiaTech) in Atlanta, US. Here, Giovanni worked in the bioinformatics group headed by Concettina Guerra on algorithmic approaches to characterize RNA 3D structural elements and biological networks.In 2010, he joined the computational biology group of Chris Sander at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) in New York.
During his post-doctoral studies, Giovanni investigated complex dependencies between genetic alterations in cancer and how these could be used to define tissue-independent tumor classes. His work revealed that functionally related alterations rarely co-occur in the same tumor and that these mutually exclusive patterns could be used to discover functional redundancies and synthetic lethal interactions. On the other hand, signatures of concurring alterations highlighted unexpected anti-correlation between the accumulation of mutations and copy number changes within genomically unstable tumors. Importantly, oncogenic signatures inform the design of targeted therapeutic strategies. Giovanni is a member of the TCGA research network where he contributed to numerous large-scale cancer genomics projects, with a particular focus on Breast Cancer.
