Ivan Merelli

I am a Senior Staff Scientist at the Institute for Biomedical Technologies of the National Research Council (ITB-CNR), where I conduct research at the intersection of computational biology, high-performance computing, and artificial intelligence. My work focuses on the design of scalable analytical pipelines for single-cell and spatial omics, multi-omics integration, and immune-repertoire profiling. I develop HPC-oriented workflows that combine statistical modelling, machine learning, and modern AI approaches to extract robust biological insights from large and heterogeneous datasets. I collaborate closely with clinical and experimental partners, including research groups at IRCCS San Raffaele and the Fondazione Telethon, contributing computational leadership to projects in cancer biology, immunology, and gene therapy. A key part of my activity involves building automated, reproducible, and AI-augmented pipelines for cell-type annotation, variant interpretation, multi-omics harmonization, and structure-based modelling of biomolecules. In addition to algorithmic development, I design web-based tools and interactive platforms that make advanced analyses accessible to multidisciplinary teams, ensuring usability, reproducibility, and efficient integration with institutional HPC infrastructures. I also support the planning and optimization of computational environments, including GPU-accelerated workflows and cloud-enabled solutions. My overarching goal is to bridge cutting-edge computational methods with real biological and clinical questions, enabling data-driven discoveries and advancing the technological capabilities of the CNR research ecosystem through strong collaborations and innovative computational solutions.