Vera Pancaldi was trained as a physicist at Imperial College London and has 13 years experience in computational biology. Since 2018 she leads a team at the Cancer Research Center of Toulouse (CRCT) as the recipient of the Chair for bioinformatics in Oncology of the CRCT, working on modelling cancer and, in particular, cellular interactions in the tumour microenvironment. She also holds a joint part-time appointment at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center through the Bioinfo4Women programme, obtained a permanent position as a CR in 2020 and defended her HDR (license to supervise PhD students) in 2021.
She has worked on various projects on stress response in fission yeast and prediction of protein and protein-RNA interactions (in the group of Jurg Bahler at Sanger Institute/University College London), epigenomics and hybrid vigour in plants (with David Baulcombe at Cambridge University) and integrative epigenomics in cancer (with Alfonso Valencia at CNIO, Madrid and Barcelona Supercomputing Center), developing novel approaches to study chromatin with network theory. She also supervised projects on networks medicine, including using network theory to study disease comorbidities and is a co-organiser of yearly international workshops in network medicine.
Her main current focus is relating heterogeneity of tumour infiltrating immune and stromal cells to patient prognosis in different cancers, through integrative multi-omics approaches.She co-supervises 4 PhD students at CRCT. In the last 3 years she has been advisor of 5 post-docs as well as 5 masters students.
She participates actively as a reviewer for Bioinformatics, Nature Communications, BMC Genomics, Molecular Biosystems, Nucleic Acids Research,PLOS Computational Biology, iScience as well as research organizations around the world. She acts as an associate editor for PeerJ and is a member of the EACR and ISCB as well as being one of the founding members of Cambridge Networks Network.