Available for collaboration · Open science

Dr. Louise
Cerdeira

Computational biologist and software engineer building open platforms that turn pathogen genomes into public-health decisions. Creator of AMRnet, TyphiNET, PlasmidNET, and InfectoNET.

5,300+Citations
34h-index
143Publications
4Live platforms
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Scientist by training,
engineer by practice.

Portrait of Dr. Louise Cerdeira

I'm a Brazilian computational biologist living and working in the UK. My day-to-day sits at the intersection of microbial genomics, web platforms, and global public health — building the tools that make genomic surveillance accessible to anyone, anywhere.

I trained as a computer scientist before moving into bioinformatics — a PhD at the University of São Paulo on the comparative genomics of multidrug-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae, then postdoctoral and engineering roles across three continents. Today I lead the design and development of AMRnet, TyphiNET, PlasmidNET, and InfectoNET — open surveillance dashboards used by ministries, reference labs, and researchers across the globe.

I care a lot about open science, the One Health framing of antimicrobial resistance, and making high-performance bioinformatics affordable for low- and middle-income countries — which is increasingly where my newer work on GPU-accelerated aligners and embedded pipelines lives.

  • RoleComputational Biologist · Software Engineer · Platform Lead
  • Based inUnited Kingdom · 🇧🇷 originally Brazil
  • ORCID0000-0002-4495-2615
  • Scholar5,300+ citations · h-index 34
  • LanguagesEnglish · Portuguese · Spanish
  • CurrentlyAMR copy-number variation in Klebsiella; GPU-native aligners for LMIC surveillance

What I work on.

My research uses microbial whole-genome sequencing and software engineering to track, understand, and contain antimicrobial-resistant pathogens — connecting bench, bioinformatics, and public-health practice.

Genomic surveillance of AMR

Dashboards and pipelines for tracking resistance in WHO-priority pathogens — Klebsiella, Salmonella, E. coli, M. tuberculosis.

One Health

Resistance crosses people, animals, food, and the environment. I work on shared genomic infrastructure that lets us see all of it at once.

Vector biology

Insecticide resistance in Anopheles and Wolbachia endosymbionts — with the Heinz Lab and MalariaGEN.

GPU bioinformatics for LMICs

Building cloud-native and embedded-system aligners (Dragon, CNVRock) so sequencing analysis doesn't need a HPC cluster.

Selected publications

  1. 2026
    AMRnet: a data visualization platform to interactively explore pathogen variants and antimicrobial resistance Cerdeira LT, Dyson ZA, Sharma V, Maranga M, Foster-Nyarko E, Carey ME, Holt KE — Nucleic Acids Research, 54(D1):D691–D702
  2. 2025
    The TyphiNET data visualisation dashboard: unlocking Salmonella Typhi genomics data to support public health Dyson ZA, Cerdeira L, Sharma V, Carey ME, Holt KE & Global Typhoid Genomics Consortium — Genome Medicine
  3. 2023
    Genome-wide association studies reveal novel loci associated with pyrethroid and organophosphate resistance in Anopheles gambiae and An. coluzzii Lucas ER, Nagi SC, Egyir-Yawson A, et al., Cerdeira L, et al. — Nature Communications, 14:4946
  4. 2022
    WHO Critical Priority Escherichia coli as One Health challenge for a post-pandemic scenario Fuga B, Sellera FP, Cerdeira L, et al.Microbiology Spectrum, 10(2)
  5. 2022
    Linear plasmids in Klebsiella and other Enterobacteriaceae Hawkey J, Cottingham H, Tokolyi A, Wick RR, Judd LM, Cerdeira L, et al.Microbial Genomics
  6. 2021
    A genomic surveillance framework and genotyping tool for Klebsiella pneumoniae and its related species complex Lam MMC, Wick RR, Watts SC, Cerdeira LT, Wyres KL, Holt KE — Nature Communications, 12:4188 · 1,000+ citations
  7. 2021
    Trycycler: consensus long-read assemblies for bacterial genomes Wick RR, Judd LM, Cerdeira LT, Hawkey J, Méric G, Vezina B, Wyres KL, Holt KE — Genome Biology, 22:266
  8. 2019
    Small IncQ1 and Col-like plasmids harbouring blaKPC-2 in high-risk lineages of Klebsiella pneumoniae CG258 Cerdeira LT, Lam MMC, Wyres KL, Wick RR, Judd LM, Lopes R, et al.Microbial Drug Resistance
  9. 2013
    The genome of Anopheles darlingi, the main neotropical malaria vector Marinotti O, Cerqueira GC, de Almeida LGP, et al., Cerdeira LT, et al.Nucleic Acids Research, 41(15):7387–7400

Full list on Google Scholar ORCID record

A worldwide
network of co-authors.

Published research with colleagues across six continents — surveillance teams, reference labs, universities, ministries of health, and open-source communities. Hover any marker to see the country.

32+Countries
6Continents
200+Co-authors
  • 🇧🇷 Brazil
  • 🇬🇧 UK
  • 🇦🇺 Australia
  • 🇺🇸 USA
  • 🇮🇳 India
  • 🇿🇦 South Africa
  • 🇰🇪 Kenya
  • 🇬🇭 Ghana
  • 🇫🇷 France
  • 🇩🇪 Germany
  • 🇮🇩 Indonesia
  • 🇸🇬 Singapore

Things I've built.

Open platforms, pipelines, and tools — most of them used in production by public-health teams or in active research.

Live · Co-author

Kleborate

Open command-line tool for typing Klebsiella pneumoniae genomes — MLST, virulence, AMR. The companion Nature Communications paper has been cited over 1,000 times.

PythonGenotypingCLI

Live · Co-author

Trycycler

Consensus long-read assembler for bacterial genomes. Produces near-perfect chromosomes from Nanopore and PacBio data. Widely adopted across the long-read assembly community.

PythonLong-readsAssembly

In development

Dragon

A cloud-native, signal-aware aligner for surveillance-scale microbial genomics — BWT, FM-index, coloured de Bruijn graphs, ML signal correction. Written in Rust, designed to fit on commodity / edge hardware.

WIP RustGPU

In development

CNVRock

Variational-autoencoder approach to AMR-gene copy-number variation across the K. pneumoniae species complex. Where the resistance is, and how much of it.

WIP PythonPyTorch

Live

InfectoNET

Genomic-epidemiology dashboard tracking emerging and re-emerging pathogens worldwide — one platform, many threats. Built to make outbreak data legible to clinicians, public-health teams, and the public.

Creator TypeScriptNext.js

Live

PlasmidNET

Interactive dashboard for exploring plasmid sequences across species — typing, AMR cargo, mobility. Built on years of work on mobile genetic elements and the way resistance actually travels between bugs.

Creator PythonDash

Live

BraSeqTB

A Nextflow pipeline for AMR detection in Mycobacterium tuberculosis, designed for the Brazilian National TB Reference Network.

NextflowTB

Live · Collaboration

MINUUR

Reproducible Snakemake pipeline that recovers metagenomic data from Aedes aegypti whole-genome sequencing reads. With the Heinz Lab at LSTM.

SnakemakeMetagenomics

Career, briefly.

  1. 2023 — Present

    Lead Software Engineer · Computational Biologist

    System architecture and lead development of AMRnet; co-coordinator of TyphiNET; design and launch of PlasmidNET and InfectoNET. Open science, internationalisation, multi-pathogen surveillance.

  2. 2022 — 2023

    Postdoctoral Bioinformatician · Vector Biology

    Wolbachia endosymbionts, Aedes microbiome (MINUUR), MalariaGEN / PAMCA Anopheles genomic-surveillance training.

  3. 2020 — 2022

    Research Software Engineer · Infectious Diseases

    Built the initial TyphiNET dashboard; contributed to Kleborate and Trycycler. Australia.

  4. 2015 — 2019

    University of São Paulo · PhD in Sciences (with honourable mention)

    Comparative genomics of multidrug-resistant K. pneumoniae CG258 — IncQ1 plasmids, KPC-2 mobility. FAPESP-funded.

  5. 2011 — 2015

    Professor & Senior Systems Analyst · Brazil

    Earlier life as an academic computer scientist and IT engineer in Brazil — bridges that still inform how I build research software today.

  6. 2009 — 2011

    Federal University of Pará · MSc in Bioinformatics

    Where computer science met biology, and never let go.

Latest from GitHub.

A live feed of my most recently updated public repositories — bioinformatics, web tooling, and occasional side quests.

Loading repositories from github.com/lcerdeira…

All repositories on GitHub

Notes from the lab and the editor.

Short essays on the things I actually think about — open science, software engineering for research, and the weird shape of the field where they meet.

All posts

Photography, poems, and a podcast.

Outside the terminal I keep a camera, a notebook, and a microphone within reach. Some of what that produces ends up here.

Watch / Listen

  • YouTube · LuLu Channel

    Science, in plain Portuguese (and a little English)

    Short videos on what I'm working on, what I just read, and how to actually run a pipeline. [TODO — add channel URL]

  • Podcast · A Popcorn Called Wilson

    Long-form conversations on science and the rest

    A side project with friends — bioinformatics, books, film, life in academia. [TODO — add podcast URL]

A featured talk

[TODO]

Drop a YouTube ID in index.html and an iframe will load here.

Conference talks · workshops · interviews

Let's build something useful.

Open to collaborations on genomic surveillance, AMR, public-health platforms, and bioinformatics software. Always happy to talk to students considering computational biology.