Simona E. Rombo

Simona E. Rombo is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Palermo, Italy, where she works since 2012. Previously, she was Postdoc in Computer Engineering at the University of Calabria (2006-2010) and at ICAR-CNR, Cosenza, Italy (2010-2012.) She obtained both her Ph.D. in Computer, Biomedical, and Telecommunication Engineering (2006) and her Laurea degree in Electronic Engineering (2002) at University “Mediterranea” of Reggio Calabria. She was Visiting Scientist at several international research institutes, among which Purdue University (West Lafayette, USA), Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, USA), National Institute of Health (Bethesda, USA).

Her main research activities include the analysis of large amounts of biological data, such as clustering and alignment of biological networks, data integration, pattern discovery from biological sequences, data compression, analysis of digital images, epigenomics. More recently, she started working on social advertising. She has co-authored about 70 scientific publications on international journals, conferences, book-chapters, and monographs. 

Simona E. Rombo co-founded Kazaam Lab, a start-up company working in the area of Big Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence for Precision Medicine. She leads the Kazaam research team on the design of algorithms and techniques for decision support in the eHealth context. The company is also a spin-off of the University of Palermo and has received both national and international acknowledgments and prizes.  

Simona E. Rombo is the Principal Investigator of several national and international research projects funded by both public and private institutions, also involving industrial companies in some cases. She is in the Editorial Board of Journal of Big Data, Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, and others. She regularly joins the Scientific and/or Organizing Committee of prestigious international conferences and workshops in the fields of Bioinformatics, Big Data Management, Algorithms, Databases.