Who?

I am interested in what makes complex systems tick – in particularly those at the confluence of living systems, physical systems and computing systems.

As of now, I am in the Distributed Computing Laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale of Lausanne, focusing on how population genetics can help us to better detect deep-fakes and on how theory of error resilience in distributed computing can help us to better understand biological organisms.

Before that I did a post-doctoral fellowship in the Joel Bader and Andrew Ewald labs as part of the CDT2 consortium – building tools and pipelines to prioritize the targets to be explored to prevent and stop breast cancer metastasis.

I did my PhD in the Dr. Rong Li’s lab at Johns Hopkins Cell Biology department and Stowers Institute for Medical Research, with the collaboration of the CNRS Biology of Genomes lab at UPMC Paris University Life Complexities doctoral school. My PhD focused on the mechanisms of rapid adaptation to stress in biological organisms, which led me to work on aneuploidy – both in yeast and cancer, theoretical population genetics and novel pathway for protein degradation.

As an Ecole Polytechnique engineering and an EPF Lausanne MSc student, I also had the opportunity to work on cell motility,  last universal common ancestor genome reconstruction, as well as tools for better drug off-target effects prediction and drug re-purposing – respectively under the supervision of Drs Rong Li and Arcady Mushegian at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research and Dr. Borune’s lab at UCSD.

I also tweet as @andrei_chiffa on Twitter. You can find my CV on LinkedIn. Finally, if you are looking to send me a secure mail, my PGP fingerprint is D7D4AC64 and can be found on MIT PGP keyserver