Joana Gonçalves is an Assistant Professor at the Delft University of Technology (TUDelft) and a Guest Researcher at the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI). Her lab uses algorithmic and statistical data science to identify relevant patterns in large-scale biomedical data. One of the primary aims is to understand gene regulation and disruptions involved in disease to identify novel targets for treatment. Relevant recent work includes a study on the influence of the regulatory landscape on Cas9 activity and induced mutation patterns, and the design of efficient algorithms for regulatory pathway identification based on biclustering analysis of time course data. She is currently looking to expand her group and starting exciting collaborations, for instance to profile and analyze post-translational modifications over time.

Joana is also actively involved in the education of future computer scientists and cross-disciplinary researchers from various backgrounds that bridge between the exact and the life sciences. She lectures Algorithms and Data Structures to approximately a thousand eager Computer Science Bachelor students and Advanced Bioinformatics in the Computer Science Master at the TUDelft.

Joana received a PhD in computer science from the Technical University of Lisbon, and spent several periods abroad over the years, e.g. at the University of Leuven and Imperial College London. Before becoming an Assistant Professor in 2017, she was a postdoc at the TUDelft and the NKI, and prior to that she held a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowship at the Netherlands Centre for Computer Science and Mathematics (CWI).