Dr. Denis Jacob Machado is an assistant professor in bioinformatics at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNC Charlotte), College of Computing and Informatics (CCI), Department of Bioinformatics and Genomics (BiG), starting on Aug. 15, 2022. He was one of the first hires of the Computational Intelligence to Predict Health and Environmental Risks (CIPHER) research center. Dr. Jacob Machado leads the phyloinformatics lab (phyloinformatics [dot] com). The phyloinformatics lab has two major goals. First, investigate new pathogens’ emergence, evolution, and spread, focusing on preventing and treating infectious diseases. Second, create computational and molecular solutions to make data from biorepositories more readily available to biomedical research.