The "In the Spotlight" series features double sessions of two 20-minute presentations, each followed by a 10-minute open dialogue and Q&A. Designed to introduce new colleagues to the broader FEM research community, these sessions offer a platform for team members to share their scientific backgrounds, present active projects, and showcase specialized technical skills. For this "In the Spotlight" session, we are pleased to introduce Dr. Paolo Sonego and Dr. Marco Moretto. Anyone interested is warmly invited to attend.

Paolo Sonego serves as a Technologist in the Digital Agriculture Unit at the Research and Innovation Centre of Fondazione Edmund Mach, where he runs RNA-Seq analyses of plants and bacteria and applies deep-learning models to machine vision problems such as insect pest monitoring and fruit phenotyping. Trained in Physics, he previously applied machine learning to clinical data at CRO Aviano, worked on protein classification at ICGEB Trieste, and ran the bioinformatics service for microarray and RNA-Seq analysis at CBM Trieste. At FEM he also worked on the gene-expression compendia COLOMBOS and VESPUCCI with Marco Moretto, and on microbial genomics. In the Horizon Europe project GENIUS, he will work on the definition of harmonised phenology and productivity metrics for six nut-tree species and turn them into multi-site datasets for breeding.

Marco Moretto is a Data Analyst in the Digital Agriculture Unit at Fondazione Edmund Mach. His recent work focuses mostly on machine learning for plant phenotyping and RNA-seq data analysis.
He trained in computer science (University of Verona) and computational biology (MSc, University of Trento; PhD, University of Padova). Before his current role, he spent over 15 years as a computational biologist at FEM. There he contributed to the genome projects of apple and grapevine, worked on transcriptomics and gene annotation, and developed the VESPUCCI grapevine gene expression database. He also helped build the GRAPEDIA grapevine genomics platform.