Welcome!
Short Bio
I am an Associate Professor (pt-br: Professor Adjunto) at the Institute of Informatics (INF), Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil, and a Research Professor at Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre (HCPA), affiliated with its Bioinformatics Core. (Núcleo de Bioinformática). I am also a CNPq Research Productivity Fellow Level 2 (PQ-2).
At INF/UFRGS, I lead the Machine Learning & Applications in Biomedical Data Lab (MLAB) and I supervise MSc and PhD students in the Graduate Program in Computer Science (PPGC).
My research lies at the intersection of Machine Learning, Bioinformatics, and Computational Biology. My work combines methodological advances in machine learning with applications in healthcare, genomics, and translational medicine. Find more about current research topics in the Research page.
Interested in a collaboration, research supervision, or simply discussing some ideas? You are welcome to contact me.
For updates on my academic activities and research highlights, follow my professional Instagram account @prof.marianamendoza.
Academic Trajectory
Before joining INF/UFRGS as a faculty member, I pursued my academic training and research formation in the following institutions:
2014-2016, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher under the supervision of Profa. Dra. Andréia Biolo in the Experimental and Molecular Cardiovascular Laboratory, at the Experimental Research Center of Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre (HCPA). I developed my research in the fields of Bioinformatics and Systems Biology. My primary focus was on investigating transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulatory networks and differential expression related to the development of cardiovascular diseases. During this period, I also collaborated in several other projects concerned with the study of mechanisms of gene expression regulation involved in the onset and progression of complex diseases, such as cancer and diabetes.
2012-2013, I was a visiting PhD student in Prof. Dr. Manolis Kellis’ Computational Biology Group, at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). I was involved in a project whose aim was to infer regulatory networks based on the integrative analysis of ENCODE/modENCODE data for human, fly and worm, and compare the structural and functional properties of the reconstructed regulatory networks across species.
2010-2014, I was a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the Institute of Informatics of UFRGS, under the advising of Profa. Dra. Ana Lúcia C. Bazzan and Prof. Dr. Adriano V. Werhli (co-advisor) in the Multiagent Systems Lab. My PhD Thesis was entitled "Exploring ensemble learning techniques to optimize the reverse engineering of gene regulatory networks". You can read it here.
2005-2010, I was an undergraduate student at the Center of Computational Sciences of Federal University of Rio Grande (FURG), from which I received my Bachelor degree in Computer Engineering. My Bachelor's thesis aimed at the reconstruction of gene regulatory networks based on a Bayesian hierarchical model and a parallel sampling algorithm, and was advised by Prof. Dr. Adriano Werhli.
