Meet the team: Ricardo Guerreiro

We're excited to introduce Ricardo Guerreiro , a valuable team member on our Bioinformatics team here at Resolve Biosciences . As a Software Developer, Ricardo brings a unique perspective - one shaped by his experiences catching animals in the Sahara Desert. With his expertise in spatial data analysis, Ricardo is dedicated to making meaningful contributions to scientific research. We're lucky to have him as part of our team!?

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Q: Please tell us about your professional journey and how you came to be in your current role.?

A: My journey with spatial starts with the Sahara Desert. During my master's studies, I traveled across the Sahara and tracked species’ distributions using GPS coordinates and created a model of distribution based on environmental variables. It was spatial analysis on a geographical scale called Biogeography. Now, I'm still doing a lot of spatial analysis – just on a microscopic scale.?

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Q: What’s your role at Resolve Biosciences??

A: I am a software developer in the Bioinformatics team, and I mainly write tools for applications in the backend of our customer portal called "Recognize". Recently, I developed a tool called "MindaGap." Our microscopes take sequential pictures of a region of interest in a tile fashion, but an empty line of a few pixels separates those tiles. Mindagap fills the grid gaps in the panoramas with sensible values that make the grid disappear and makes the picture look crisp. It's been very helpful to customers because this improves the cell segmentation results significantly. It is now available on my Github repository and has been referenced in a few research papers.?Now this feature has been implemented on our customer portal and is available to all our customers.?

I am also working on a tool that joins the tiles into a panorama, called Pypanela, to include new features and give optimal outputs for easy cell segmentation.?

Q: How did you come up with the name “MindaGap”???

A: "Mindagap" is often used on trains to remind passengers to watch the gap between the train and the platform when they exit the train. But there is a double wordplay here. "MindaGap" was also a popular Portuguese hip-hop band in the 90s, originary from my hometown in Portugal, not that I remember any song but I’m always happy to pay homage to Porto. ?

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Q: What interesting/challenging projects have you been working on? How does it work out??

A: I have new challenges almost every week, small obstacles that feel good to overcome. When I struggle, I talk with my team lead, Frank Reinecke. He can quickly understand problems and provide constructive feedback. The biggest challenge I have right now is integrating my tools into the work system so there is a seamless workflow to handle customer data input and outputs. For example, customers can already do segmentation in our tool, but it requires a few images as input for different channels. We are integrating everything in one single RGB image and feeding it to an algorithm that can tell where each cell and its boundaries are. The difficulty is anticipating and testing the various scenarios and inputs that clients might use.?

We have been putting a lot of effort into understanding customers' pain points and how we can improve the software pipeline.?

Q: How would you describe your team's culture??

A: Friendly, tolerant, and intellectually engaging. Sometimes if I'm stuck, we will have discussions. It's always very engaging discussions and I always learn something new. It's cool. It's exciting to come to work every day.??

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Q: What's your favorite thing to do in your spare time??

A: I love doing medieval sword fighting. I've always done martial arts my whole life, started karate when I was five. When I was in the university in Portugal, I came across medieval sword fighting and have been doing it now for a decade. I go to medieval fairs in summer sometimes.?

Q: Are there any skills or talents you'd like to develop or pursue in the future??

A: Finishing my PhD studies is my top priority at the moment. I am trying to juggle it with my free time, but it's a challenging task. My dissertation is on C3-C4 photosynthesis, which is a complex subject. Though genome assembly and annotation were my primary focus, these are systems with strong spatial patterns of gene expression. I would be excited about the prospect of applying Molecular Cartography to C3-C4 leaf samples and conducting research on it. If successful, this research could lead to a reduction in water usage for commercial crops, which is a huge deal given the growing water scarcity problem.??

Apart from my studies, I am also interested in the field of artificial intelligence. It's a hot topic these days, and I find it fascinating. I have already developed my neural network once when I was in university, and I am keen on exploring this direction further.?

Q: If you could add one more feature in the “ReCognize”, what would that be????

One feature that I'm very much looking forward to having is 3D cell segmentation. At the moment, we do only 2D segmentation. But it would be cool to have the 3D outlines of the cells. Besides the “wow” factor, I’m quite sure it will add accuracy to transcript-to-cell assignments. I’m not aware of anyone else working on this besides us.?

#singlecell #genomics #spatialtranscriptomics #bioinformatics #softwaredevelopment #hr