Beltrame Group at MBZUAI

About

Olá! My name is Eduardo da Veiga Beltrame, I was born and raised in Florianópolis, Brazil. I am an Assistant Professor of Computational Biology and the Director of Educatoin of the Division of Biological and Life Sciences at MBZUAI in Abu Dhabi, where I oversee our recently launched masters and PhD programs in Computational Biology. I completed my PhD in Bioengineering at Caltech, where I focused on computational and experimental method development for single cell omics. Before joining MBZUAI I was a founding scientist at Retro Biosciences, a biotechnology startup focused on aging biology, and bioinformatics lead at ImYoo, a biotechnology startup leveraging single cell omics to advance patient-centric precision medicine.

Other links: Here is my MBZUAI faculty profile, my CV, my GitHub and LinkedIn.
My personal website is munfred.com.

Want to study Computational Biology at MBZUAI?


Want to study Computational Biology at MBZUAI?

For our 2027 cohort we are offering fully funded masters and PhD scholarships to study in Computational Biology at MBZUAI in Abu Dhabi with excellent student support in a highly collaborative and interdisciplinary research environment with faculty coming from the world’s leading universities.

We are recruiting our 2027 MSc and PhD cohorts in Computational Biology. Every admitted student is fully funded (AED 15,500/month for MSc students and AED 17,500/month for PhD students). That covers housing, a monthly stipend, travel, healthcare and other benefits. The current stipend rates are on MBZUAI’s scholarship page, linked below. All first-year students get on-campus housing, and we handle visas and arrival logistics, so you have a place to live and everything is ready when you land. The MSc is 2 years and the PhD is 4 years.

Our Faculty and Research

Our faculty trained and worked at places like Harvard, Stanford, Caltech, UC Berkeley, UCL and EMBL. We also work closely with collaborators around the world and with hospitals here in Abu Dhabi, including Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi. Our research covers multi-omics, single-cell analysis, cancer, biomedical foundation models, digital health, epidemiology, personalized medicine and much more.

Several of our groups work with two large population health datasets. One is the Emirati Genome Program, which is one of the largest population genomics programs in the world and has sequenced more than 900,000 Emirati genomes. The other is the Human Phenotype Project, a deep-phenotyping cohort that follows participants over time and combines genetics, microbiome, metabolomics, blood tests, and continuous glucose and sleep monitoring to build AI models that predict disease onset and progression.

How the Programs Work

We modeled our Computational Biology graduate programs after Caltech’s bioengineering PhD program, where I did my PhD, to be flexible and interdisciplinary by design. Our current students come from many different backgrounds: biology, medicine, bioengineering, computer science, statistics, physics, chemistry and more. What we look for is a genuine interest in biology and a solid quantitative and programming foundation.

During your first year in the program, you will choose courses that support the research you want to do. MSc and PhD students follow the same integrated program, and strong MSc students can articulate into the PhD in their second year. Every student also completes a fully funded 3-month internship at a top academic or industry lab anywhere in the world.

Our students come from all over the world, and our Computational Biology programs have a 50/50 gender ratio. Our inaugural Computational Biology cohort this year had 48 students, and next year we plan to admit a larger cohort.

Applications and Admissions

Applications are open now and close on January 22. We review applications and send offers on a rolling basis, so it pays to apply early.

There are two stages:

  1. Our faculty review your application and choose who to interview.
  2. If you’re selected, four faculty members interview you. After that, we make a final decision and send offers.

The gap between applying and being interviewed can be as short as two weeks. MBZUAI now charges a university-wide application fee of AED 200, but it’s waived if you score 75% or above on the screening exam.

Required Application Materials

To submit your application to Computational Biology, you need to prepare the following materials for both MSc and PhD applications:

Below are some useful links. Ask me anything!

Useful Links

Research interests

My main research interest is on developing methods and tools for working with biological data generated by single cell omics technologies, which are key to advancing precision medicine. I am particularly interested in single cell RNA sequencing data, which is now being generated much faster than researchers can analyze it. I am establishing a research group to develop new methods and tools that can streamline biological analysis and make it easy to ask biological questions about the data for researchers of all backgrounds, and to explore the development of interactive analysis tools that incorporate recent advances in machine learning, such as natural language models, which can make biological analysis easier, faster and broaden access to more researchers.

Looking for a Postdoctoral Scholar!

I am currently recruiting a postdoctoral scholar to work with me at MBZUAI in Abu Dhabi with strong experience in population genomics to work with data relating to the Emirati Genome Program. Interest in collaboration, teaching and mentorship experience is highly valuable.

Prospective Students, Visiting Students and Applying to Graduate Programs

Please note that I do not have bandwith to mentor students outside of MBZUAI. If you would like to work with me as a student, you need to first have been accepted by a MBZUAI program - please do not write me a generic email asking to work with me or at MBZUAI (if you do, I will send you this link in response.

Prospective Research Assistants

Please note: I am not hiring a research assistant at this time. I am only looking for a postdoctoral scholar , which requires having a PhD in hand.

Prospective Faculty

If you are looking for permanent faculty positions, MBZUAI has an ongoing search for Open Rank Faculty in Computational Biology. Feel free to reach to me out if you have any questions.