Pedro J. Torres

Director, Bioinformatics and Data Science @Persephone Biosciences

San Diego, CA, US

Led my team in a cross-functional effort advancing probiotic product development, resulting in a Nature paper and a consumer launch in Sept 2025.• Directed longitudinal clinical analyses assessing safety, tolerability, and microbiome impact of Persephone’s novel probiotic consortia in infants and toddlers.• Built a machine-learning framework predicting production of key infant metabolites from metagenomic functional annotations.• Architected and deployed an AWS-based data lake and relational database (Hive + Athena), integrating internal/external NGS data across functional, taxonomic, and metadata layers while tracking sample QC. This enabled fast, structured access and low-cost storage for analytics, ML, and recovery of previously inaccessible datasets.• Led design and rollout of automated bioinformatics workflows in Nextflow—defining requirements, aligning cross-team goals, and ensuring scalable, reproducible pipelines for QC, taxonomy, and functional annotation.• Directed the data science team across projects including probabilistic clustering for patient stratification, powering a personalized-nutrition initiative with Kroger. Developed feature-selection methods blending statistics and ML to identify informative variables, and applied relative-risk models to 2-year infant data showing a 3-fold reduction in adverse outcomes tied to targeted microbiome clusters.• Created interactive knowledge graphs with chatbot and Streamlit app integration, merging insights from internal data and literature to steer probiotic strategy. Designed a scoring system ranking features and pathways within target taxa by relationship strength, study type, and effect size—driving data-driven R&D prioritization and product optimization.

UC San Diego

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Biology/Biological Sciences, General

UC Santa Barbara

BS, Biology

San Diego State University

Master of Science (M.S.), Microbiology