My research interests cover the methodological advances in data science and their application to topical biomedical challenges, with the focus on advancing transcriptomics and metagenomics on the road to precision medicine. In this manner I hold a lead role in the SEQC consortium co-ordinated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the benchmarking of large-scale gene expression profiling technologies, including RNA-Seq. Currently, in the second phase of SEQC I am investigating the complementarity of targeted RNA-Seq and genome sequencing for refined cancer diagnosis. I am also a lead member of the MetaSUB International Consortium where I focus on establishing environmental metagenomics assays in healthcare as well as on enabling the use of environmental microbiome analysis for forensic purposes.