Dr. Antonio Rausell has an Engineering degree with a focus in Biotechnology and a PhD in Bioinformatics. He did his PhD under the supervision of Prof. Alfonso Valencia at the Spanish National Cancer Research Center (CNIO). From 2012 until February 2016 he worked as a postdoctoral researcher with a double affiliation to the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) with Prof. Ioannis Xenarios, and the University Hospital of Lausanne with Prof. Amalio Telenti. During that time he specialized in the study of the genetic basis of susceptibility to infectious diseases and the heterogeneity in the innate immune response at single-cell level. His findings have contributed to better characterizing two main paradigms arising from large-scale genome and transcriptome sequencing projects: A) the widespread potential to cause disease of rare loss-of-function variants occurring in heterozygosis through haploinsufficiency or negative dominance; and B) the transcriptional basis of the heterogeneity in permissiveness to infection across single cells within individuals.

In March 2016, Dr. Rausell joined the Imagine Institute as Director of the new Clinical Bioinformatics lab. His group develops bioinformatics tools with a clinical focus in two main areas of current research in genetic diseases: