Deisy Morselli Gysi

Network Science for Precision Medicine

I am a Professor in the Department of Statistics and head of the Precision Analytics Lab at the Federal University of Paraná ( UFPR), Brazil. I also supervise graduate students in UFPR’s Bioinformatics and Informatics programs. My research sits at the intersection of Network Science, Machine Learning, and Precision Medicine, where I develop computational approaches to understand disease mechanisms and support more targeted diagnostics and therapies.

My work combines molecular, clinical, and population-level data to study complex disease. I am particularly interested in network-based biomarker discovery, drug repurposing, and the contribution of non-coding RNA interactions to disease diagnosis, progression, and treatment. I also develop open methods and R packages that help researchers analyze and interpret complex biomedical data.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I contributed to a network-medicine framework for drug repurposing, identifying candidate treatments for SARS-CoV-2 infection. I also contributed to the 20th anniversary of the Human Genome Project in Nature. More recently, my research has shown how non-coding RNAs expand the predictive power of Network Medicine, with applications ranging from cancer biology to the future of network biology.

Before joining UFPR, I was an Associate Research Scientist at the BarabasiLab and the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University. I was also a Research Trainee at the Channing Division of Network Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and a Bioinformatician at Veterans Affairs. These experiences shaped my interest in using network-based approaches to investigate autoimmune conditions, mental health, and age-related diseases.

I hold Bachelor’s degrees in Biotechnology from the Pontifical Catholic University and in Statistics from UFPR. During my undergraduate studies, I received two awards for research projects and worked as a Risk Analyst at HSBC. I later worked as a Bioinformatician at the Heart Institute of the University of São Paulo (USP), studying co-expression networks and the effects of single nucleotide polymorphisms on them, and as a Statistician at Albert Einstein Hospital, advising its research department.

I completed my Ph.D. at the University of Leipzig, Germany, under the supervision of Dr. Peter Stadler, Dr. Katja Nowick, and Dr. Martin Middendorf. Today, I lead research and training at UFPR with the goal of making network-based approaches useful, transparent, and impactful in biomedicine.