Denis Jacob Machado
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Denis Jacob Machado builds evolutionary trees and puts them to work on pathogens, parasites, and biodiversity. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioinformatics and Genomics at UNC Charlotte and leads the Phyloinformatics Lab at the CIPHER research center.
The lab joins phylogenetics, machine learning, and high-performance computing. It tracks recombination in dengue and other viruses, predicts how new mutations change antibody binding, recovers genomes from old museum specimens, and studies the brittle star collagen that turns from stiff to soft in seconds. The lab’s open-source platform, Péva, finds parsimony trees and then tells you how much to trust them.
Now
- Editorial Board Member of Cladistics, where I handle manuscripts as an editor, and of BMC Genomic Data.
- Fellow of the Willi Hennig Society since 2024, member of its Council for 2026 to 2028, and host of the Society’s 2028 Annual Meeting at UNC Charlotte.
- Advisor of four Ph.D. candidates in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology.
- Grants from NIH/NIAID through the READDI-AViDD Center, CNPq in Brazil, FAPESP, and UNC Charlotte.
Path
- 2022 to now: Assistant Professor, UNC Charlotte.
- 2019 to 2022: Postdoctoral Researcher, UNC Charlotte, on the evolution of coronaviruses and flaviviruses and the genomes of regenerating echinoderms.
- 2018: Ph.D. in Bioinformatics, Universidade de São Paulo (dissertation).
- 2012: M.Sc. in Zoology, Universidade de São Paulo.
- 2009: B.Sc. in Biological Sciences with a qualification in Marine Biology, Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP).
A tapeworm named for him
In 2025, Sakai, Marques, and Trevisan named a new tapeworm from the longnose stingray Anthocephalum machadoi, for his contribution to cestode systematics through bioinformatics.
Say his name
His first name is Denis and his last name is Jacob Machado. He has no middle name. Hear it on YouTube or NameCoach.