Rate My Professor Marcos Santoro

Marcos Leite Santoro is Professor Adjunto in the Discipline of Molecular Biology within the Department of Biochemistry at the Escola Paulista de Medicina of Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). He holds a bachelor's degree in Biomedical Sciences (Biomedicine) from Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho (UNESP-Botucatu). He completed his master's and doctoral degrees in the Discipline of Genetics at the Department of Morphology and Genetics of UNIFESP, with a focus on psychiatric genetics and large-scale genomic analysis. His doctoral thesis examined potential genetic markers in the early phases of schizophrenia under the supervision of Sintia Iole Nogueira Belangero. During his doctorate, he conducted a one-year research internship at the MRC Social, Genetics & Developmental Psychiatry Centre at King's College London, advancing his expertise in bioinformatics and large-scale genetic and epigenetic data analysis.

Following his doctorate, Santoro completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Psychiatry at UNIFESP, investigating the transcriptome and polygenic risk scores in a longitudinal cohort of children and adolescents at risk for psychiatric disorders. He also served as a visiting researcher for one year at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital, supported by a FAPESP fellowship, exploring approaches to apply polygenic risk scores in admixed populations. He acted as visiting professor in the Graduate Program in Structural and Functional Biology at UNIFESP from November 2019 to November 2021. His primary areas of activity are bioinformatics, genetics, and molecular biology, with emphasis on risk markers for psychiatric diseases, including polygenic risk scores and epigenetic regulation by miRNAs. He serves as advisor in the Graduate Programs in Structural and Functional Biology and in Biological Sciences (Molecular Biology) at UNIFESP. Santoro has contributed to numerous publications in high-impact journals on topics such as schizophrenia genetics, polygenic scores, and related psychiatric research.