Valentina Di Francesco is the National Human Genome Research Institute’s (NHGRI) Chief Data Science Strategist and Director of the new Office of Genomic Data Science. In this role, she provides leadership, strategic guidance and coordination for NHGRI activities and programs in genomic data science and data sharing policies.
Ms. Di Francesco joined NHGRI in 2014 and was the lead program director of the Computational Genomics and Data Science Program. She coordinated a diverse portfolio of genomic data science and computational biology grants and funding opportunities, and oversaw a grant portfolio that included model organism databases, and the NHGRI Genomic Data Science Analysis, Visualization, and Informatics Lab-Space (AnVIL) Program. Ms. Di Francesco also contributed to several trans-NIH data science committees and activities, including the launch of the NIH Cloud Platforms Interoperability (NCPI) efforts.
Before joining NHGRI, Ms. Di Francesco was a program officer at the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for more than 10 years. She was primarily responsible for the bioinformatics, structural genomics and systems biology programs at NIAID, where she initiated and established initiatives focused on the use of high-throughput "omics" technologies, the development of big-data management and integration tools, and predictive modeling of the host/pathogen molecular interaction networks.