The Health Integrity Project
Community platform for expert-reviewed health claim verification — connecting users with evidence-backed analysis of health products and scientific literature
Director, Bioinformatics Platform · Harvard Chan School
Lorena Pantano
I build tools and platforms that turn complex genomic data into clear insights. 13+ years spanning biotech, pharma, and academia — from RNA biology to AI-driven target discovery.
Podcast Host
Women in Bioinformatics
Nextflow Maintainer
Portfolio
Featured Work
Open-source tools, platforms, and dashboards built for research and personal use.
PANGEA-SMM Clinical Calculator
Production web app for a Nature Medicine paper — a dynamic risk calculator for smoldering multiple myeloma built with React + R Plumber, deployed on Netlify and GCP
Training Progress Dashboard
Interactive React.js dashboard for personal fitness data visualization and analysis
Videos 
Tutorials & Talks
Video content on bioinformatics, data science, and career development.
Accessible MM progression risk score tool for researchers
Integrated Genomic Data Visualization and Automation Platform
Systematic Paper Reviews with Claude Custom Commands/Skills
Bringing IGV webapp to Your Cloud Workspace in Seqera
WLD E6 AI for Interviews
WLD E5 Bioinformatics Interviews Decoded
WLD E4 Amplifying Minorities
WLD 3 Understanding Your Managers World
Writing
View all posts
Posts
AI Won't Solve This Alone
But it will help. Testing with the right files is always the breakthrough.
Hallucinations in Literature Review Can Be Invisible
An LLM reading scientific PDFs invented ~95% of the numbers we spot-checked. Here's the grounding setup (Files API, prompt cache, citations, and strict skill rules) that keeps it honest.
What's your first reaction when you see this chart?
A job market chart shows women outpacing men. But what happens when you look at raw numbers instead of?
A Lab-Scale Pipeline Factory: Agentic Infrastructure for Nextflow Development
How one bioinformatician used AI agents to eliminate pipeline development bottlenecks — architecture, agents, memory system, and hard-won rules from Nextflow Summit 2026.
How I Built an AI-Powered Scientific Paper Review System
Architecture walkthrough of an AI-guided peer review system using Claude, GitHub, Supabase, and Next.js to evaluate health claim evidence at scale.
From R Shiny to Production: How We Built a Clinical Calculator for a Nature Medicine Paper
How we rebuilt PANGEA-SMM's R Shiny prototype into a production React + R Plumber web app — deployed on Netlify and GCP — for a Nature Medicine publication.
Talks
View all talks
Speaking
2026
A Lab-Scale Pipeline Factory: Using AI Agents and Skills to Accelerate Nextflow Development
The Ghobrial Lab generates hundreds of single-cell RNA-seq, spatial transcriptomics, and whole-genome sequencing datasets across large patient cohorts — and the…
2025
Unified, community-developed analysis guidelines and templates for multi-omics data interpretability
Biomedical research generates complex, large-scale data that presents challenges in manipulation, storage, distribution, and analysis, particularly for non-comp…
2025
Lorena Pantano: Unified, community-developed analysis guidelines and templates for multi-omics data interpretability
As part of the panel discussion 'Managing Data Analyses with Nextflow and nf-core in Bioinformatics Core Facilities,' I presented our current project, bcbio-rep…
2024
BaWIB X BWCB joint meetup! Leveraging Mentorship Through Career Hurdles
I had the privilege of participating in a panel discussion with [Boahemaa Adu-Oppong](https://www.linkedin.com/in/badu-oppong/?lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship…
2024
Lorena Pantano: Transitioning through the nf-core era at the Harvard Chan Bioinformatics Core
The Harvard Chan Bioinformatics Core is dedicated to fostering collaboration within the Life Sciences, aiming to expedite research endeavors using innovative an…
2021
Women in Life Sciences: How do we Close the Gender Gap in Leadership?
With a global push in recent years to encourage young women toward careers in STEM, the life sciences have benefited enormously from more inclusive priorities a…
2021
Inside a Bioinformatics Startup – with NextRNA Therapeutics
In this podcast, Rob Lalonde of Seqera Labs speaks with Lorena Pantano, head of Computational Biology at NextRNA, a firm leading the next revolution in RNA-dire…
2019
miRNA variants (isomiRs): real molecules or sequencing artifacts?
Advances in high-throughput sequencing technologies led to the discovery of isomiRs, which are miRNA sequence variants. In the last year, a few papers have poin…
2018
MiRNA Wars: The isomiRs menance
BIG
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small RNA molecules (~22 nucleotide long) involved in post-transcriptional gene regulation. Advances in high-throughput sequencing techno…
2018
miRTOP: An open source community project for the development of a unified format file for miRNA data
Bioinformatics Open Source Conference 2018
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small RNA molecules (20-27 nt long) that are involved in eukaryotic gene regulation. They regulate targeted genes by RNA complementarity…
2016
Characterization of the small RNA transcriptome using the bcbio-nextgen python framework
Bioinformatics Open Source Conference 2016
The study of small RNA helps us understand some of the complexity of gene regulation of a cell. Of the different types of small RNAs, the most important in mamm…
Publications
Research Papers
35+ peer-reviewed publications in bioinformatics, genomics, and computational biology. View full list on Google Scholar →