Rodrigo Kazu

I am a Brazilian-born British computational genomics researcher with a PhD in Cybernetics from the University of Reading, currently at the Sheffield Institute for Translational Neuroscience (SITraN) jointly with the Stanford Centre for Genomics, affiliated with Cambridge Neuroscience. From an undergraduate degree in biology in Rio de Janeiro to a master's in neuroscience centred on brain evolution in artiodactyls, with publications in Frontiers in Neuroanatomy (2014) and PNAS (2019), I got a CNPq scholarship that funded a PhD in Cybernetics at the University of Reading, where I built open-source toolboxes for neuronal signal analysis. That investment paid off in my first postdoc at the Active Touch Laboratory, University of Sheffield: a computational model of the tactile responses of the human foot sole, designed to restore real-time sensory feedback to prosthetic limb users. The work won the INSIGNEO Institute prize for best research, was published in iScience (2022), and was covered as a breakthrough in neuroprosthetics. After a stint in industry, I got back to the Wellcome Sanger Institute and then joined the Cooper-Knock lab at SITraN, where I hold a joint appointment with the Stanford Centre for Genomics. At SITraN, I lead the largest ALS single-cell multiome dataset assembled to date, 788,330 nuclei across 70 donors, mapping the regulatory architecture of motor neuron degeneration, including a WDR49+ astrocyte subpopulation that is protective against the disease. Additionally, I've built an end-to-end 10x Xenium spatial transcriptomics pipeline applied to human post-mortem ALS/MND spinal cord, glioblastoma, and spinal cord injury tissue that integrates DOT-based deconvolution, spatial niche identification (NicheCompass/Novae), and network controllability to spatially resolve GWAS-enriched cell populations and glial niche architecture. A third project examining TDP-43-mediated splicing dysregulation as a shared mechanism across ALS, FTD, and Alzheimer's disease is currently in review at Nature.

Code: github.com/rodrigokazu;
ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3511-6439; Scopus Author ID: 56590059200