Biography

Also see my resume and CV (PDF format) or my scientific biography which is a longer document with a focus on the scientific work performed.

Luis Pedro Coelho is the principal investigator (PI) of the Big Data Biology Lab at the Centre for Microbiome Research at the Queensland University of Technology (Brisbane, Australia). Previously, his lab was hosted at Fudan University in Shanghai (2018–2023).

Prior to becoming a group leader, Luis worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Peer Bork's group at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). He has a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University where he worked under the supervision of Prof. Bob Murphy and a MSc from Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, where he worked with Prof Arlindo Oliveira. He works on the analysis of microbial communities in different environments, such as the marine environment, the human gut or the soil, using computational methods. His current interests include the small proteins of the global microbiome (among them antimicrobial peptides), machine-learning methods for metagenomic binning, and antimicrobial resistance. Earlier in his career, he worked on bioimage informatics, the application of computer vision to biological images. Luis is a Fulbright Scholar, a Siebel Scholar, an ARC Future Fellow, and has won multiple awards for academic and research excellence.

Outside academia, Luis has been involved in theatre (having produced the student group at IST and starred in several productions), as well as received a prize in a short story competition. He has taught computer usage in underprivileged neighbourhoods and designed Webpages for nonprofits. In Summer 2010, he was in Mozambique, volunteering with local organisations there beiraproject.org.

Luis can be found at luispedro.org and blogs at luispedro.substack.com. See also his contact details and press mentions.

Photos

If you need photos of me (for press purposes &c), please check this page.