About me
Miguel Morard is a Swiss-Spanish bioinformatician and yeast geneticist specialised in yeast genomics, structural variation and long-read sequencing. He is currently a Severo Ochoa postdoctoral researcher (Data Science area) at the Institute of Agrochemistry and Food Technology (IATA-CSIC) in Valencia, Spain, where he works in the Yeastomics laboratory of the Food Biotechnology Department. He holds a PhD in Biotechnology and Biomedicine from the Universitat de València.
His research asks how yeast genomes change, and what those changes mean for the cell. Combining comparative and population genomics with Oxford Nanopore and PacBio sequencing, he studies structural variation, aneuploidy and hybridisation in Saccharomyces and non-conventional yeasts, with a particular focus on the dynamics of the mitochondrial genome and heteroplasmy in hybrids. Much of this work is done in wild and industrial species of interest to food and agricultural biotechnology, such as S. kudriavzevii, Starmerella and Torulaspora. → Check publication record
On the computational side he develops reproducible bioinformatics pipelines (R, Python, R Markdown, Linux/HPC) for genome assembly and annotation, variant calling and annotation, pangenome analysis, RNA-seq and amplicon-based community profiling (16S and ITS), and he cares as much about the figures as about the statistics behind them.
Before returning to academia he spent three years in industry as a Torres Quevedo postdoctoral researcher at ValGenetics S.L., where he founded and led the company's Bioinformatics Unit (2020–2024). There he brought Nanopore sequencing into applied services — plant pathogen diagnostics and varietal identification — and turned bioinformatics into a product for the agri-food sector, an experience he considers a turning point in his career. He keeps that applied side alive through technological-support contracts and international collaborations, including groups in Switzerland (Agroscope and HES-SO Changins), Italy and Argentina.
He contributes to bioinformatics teaching in master's programmes at the Universitat de València, supervises students, and is involved in the organisation of the PYFF9 conference (Valencia, September 2026). He works in Spanish, English and French. → See CV