Paul Cantalupo is a systems programmer and computational virology researcher with over two decades at the University of Pittsburgh, where he built the Pickaxe pipeline to detect and assemble known and novel viruses from NGS data. His work has led to key discoveries—including linking HPV to bladder cancer and identifying HeLa contamination artifacts—and contributed complete viral genomes from environmental samples like sewage. Combining deep wet-lab experience in microbiology with strong bioinformatics and Perl/R skills, he routinely performs RNA-Seq analyses and develops robust, tested tools (notably contributing bug fixes and Infernal 1.1 support to BioPerl). Paul’s research focuses on mining the vast “dark matter” of metagenomes to reveal novel viral genomes and their impact on host regulation in cancer.
13 years of coding experience
Masters, Information Science, QPA 3.9, Masters, Information Science, QPA 3.9 at University of Pittsburgh
Contributions:31 commits, 2 PRs, 9 pushes in 5 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Paul primarily contributed to bug fixes and enhancements within the BioPerl code base, focusing on improving the accuracy of calculations, addressing parsing issues, and adding unit tests. Their work involved modifications to various Perl modules, including those related to sequence searching (hmmer2 and infernal) and sequence manipulation (Bio::SeqUtils). They also implemented support for Infernal version 1.1 and addressed multiple issues reported by the community.
Contributions:47 pushes, 3 branches in 5 years 1 month
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Paul Cantalupo - Systems Programmer at University of Pittsburgh