Michele Morgante

Michele Morgante is currently the Scientific Director of Istituto di Genomica Applicata in Udine and is professor of Genetics at the University of Udine. He was educated as a geneticist in Padova and Udine and then worked for 5 years at DuPont Crop Genomics as Senior scientist. His research group has been instrumental in establishing a number of genetic technology platforms that are now being widely deployed in plant genomic research (e.g. microsatellites, fluorescent BAC fingerprinting). His research programme is currently focusing on genome analysis in plants, including genome sequencing and resequencing and genome evolution studies, sequence  diversity analysis and epigenomics. He has contributed to the sequencing of the grapevine, peach and citrus genome and is currently sequencing the olive tree. He is particularly interested in novel approaches to dissecting complex traits and in developing the genomics and informatics technologies needed for this.

He is a member of Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (National Academy of Sciences) and has received the 2005 Medal for Physical and Natural Sciences of the Accademia Nazionale delle Scienze detta dei XL. He is section editor of BMC Genetics and associate editor of BMC Plant Biology. In 2011 he has been awarded by the European Research Council an Advanced Grant for the analysis of plant pan genomes.