Roles
Research Assistant Professor
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Biography
Dr. Descostes is a Research Assistant Professor in the Dr. John T. Macdonald Foundation Department of Human Genetics at the University of Miami (UM) Miller School of Medicine and a member of the Cancer Epigenetics Program at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center. He received his Ph.D. in Bioinformatics and Genomics from Aix-Marseille University in 2014, where he studied the post-translational modifications of the RNA Polymerase II carboxy-terminal domain in the laboratory of Pierre Ferrier under the supervision of Jean-Christophe Andrau. His doctoral work led to the discovery that tyrosine phosphorylation of the Pol II CTD is associated with antisense promoter transcription and active enhancers in mammalian cells. He then joined Dr. Danny Reinberg's laboratory at New York University as a postdoctoral fellow, where he investigated gene regulation by chromatin-associated and histone chaperone proteins, contributing to studies on Polycomb Repressive Complex 2 and H3K36me2 reader proteins LEDGF/HDGF2. He subsequently served as Head of Bioinformatics at EMBL Rome, where he supported over a dozen research projects across diverse areas of epigenetics and transcription, co-chaired the EMBL Workflow Management Systems workstream, and developed several open-source bioinformatics tools and R/Bioconductor packages. With nearly 15 years of experience in computational genomics and over 2,000 citations across 17 peer-reviewed publications, Dr. Descostes launched his independent research program at UM in 2025, focusing on computational approaches to study transcription and epigenetics at transposable elements, with applications to cancer biology. -
Education & Training
Education
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Research Interests
Dr. Descostes's research program develops computational approaches to study transcription and epigenetics at transposable elements (TEs), with applications to cancer biology. TEs constitute approximately half of mammalian genomes and have emerged as key players in cancer immunity and therapeutic development — when epigenetically derepressed, they can trigger anti-tumor immune responses and generate tumor-specific neoantigens. However, their repetitive nature creates a fundamental computational barrier: short sequencing reads cannot be uniquely mapped to specific TE loci, severely limiting our understanding of their regulation and therapeutic potential.
To overcome this challenge, Dr. Descostes's laboratory develops novel computational and machine learning methods to resolve TE activity at locus-level resolution, moving beyond the family-level averaging that currently dominates the field. The lab integrates these tools with multi-omics data to investigate how combinatorial epigenetic mechanisms regulate TE silencing across developmental and cancer contexts.A complementary research direction explores how TEs influence transcriptional regulation at nearby genes, with implications for understanding oncogenic transcriptional programs.
The overall goal of the laboratory is to combine computational and biological perspective to improving TE-based biomarkers and informing more targeted epigenetic strategies in cancer. -
Publications
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