Suzana Santos

Suzana de Siqueira Santos

About Me

I am a professor at the Center for Mathematics, Computing and Cognition, in UFABC, the Federal University of ABC, in Santo André, São Paulo, Brazil. I teach computer science courses and work with the development of methods for problems involving graphs, machine learning, applied to maily to biology, Medicine, and pharmacology. Below you can find a short bio, a list of my publications and links to my google scholar and lattes (CV) profiles.

Short bio: I obtained my bachelor (2012), master (2015), and PhD (2020) in computer science at the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics, University of São Paulo. Both my master and doctoral thesis were supervised by Prof. André Fujita. During my masters, I developed a statistical test to compare gene co-expression networks. Later, in my doctorate, I did a research internship at the Laboratory of Probability, Statistics and Modeling, Sorbonne University, under supervision of Prof. Catherine Matias. We proved the consistency of a parameter estimation procedure for random graphs developed by our research group, which is based on the spectral density. I also studied properties of the largest eigenvalue of random graphs and applied this knowledge to the analysis of brain functional networks. Between 2020 and 2023, I was a postdoc fellow at the PaccanaroLab, in the School of Applied Mathematics, Fundação Getulio Vargas, Rio de Janeiro, under the supervision of Prof. Alberto Paccanaro, where I worked with  computational biology and machine learning problems. I developed methods for drug repositioning against viral diseases, including COVID-19. Since november 2023 I am a professor at the Center for Mathematics, Computing and Cognition, in the Federal University of UFABC, Santo André. My current research relies on diverse areas such as matrix decomposition models, network medicine and random graphs.

Research interests

  • Complex networks
  • Random graphs
  • Matrix decomposition models
  • Machine learning -- with focus on interpretability
  • Collaborative filtering
  • Network Medicine
  • Computational biology and bioinformatics
  • Systems pharmacology
  • Systems biology
  • Applications in complex diseases and neuroscience

Publications

Journal Articles

  • Santos SS, Takahashi DY, Nakata A, Fujita A. A comparative study of statistical methods used to identify dependencies between gene expression signals. Briefings in Bioinformatics. 15: 906-918, 2013.

  • Santos SS, Galastro TFA, Watanabe RA, Oba-Shinjo SM, Nagahashi-Marie SK, Fujita A. CoGA: an R package to identify differentially co-expressed gene sets by analyzing the graph spectra. PLoS ONE. 10: 0135831, 2015.

  • Sato JR, Vidal MC, Santos SS, Massirer KB, Fujita A. Complex network measures in Autism Spectrum Disorders. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. 15(2):581-587, 2018.

  • Jardim VC, Santos SS, Fujita A and Buckeridge MS. BioNetStat: A Tool for Biological Networks Differential Analysis. Frontiers in Genetics. 10:594, 2019.

  • Fujita A, Lira ES, Santos SS, Bando SY, Soares GE, Takahashi DY. A semi-parametric statistical test to compare complex networks. Journal of Complex Networks. Volume 8, Issue 2, April 2020, cnz028, https://doi.org/10.1093/comnet/cnz028.

  • Franco YEM, Alves MJ, Uno M, Moretti IF, Trombetta-Lima M, Santos SS, Santos AF, Arini GS, Baptista MS, Lerario AM, Oba-Shinjo SM, Marie SKN. Glutaminolysis dynamics during astrocytoma progression correlates with tumor aggressiveness. Cancer Metab. 9(1):18, 2021

  • Santos SS, Fujita A, Matias C. Spectral density of random graphs: convergence properties and application in model fitting. Journal of Complex Networks. Volume 9, Issue 6, December 2021, cnab041, https://doi.org/10.1093/comnet/cnab041

  • Santos SS, Torres M, Galeano D, Sánchez MM, Cernuzzi L, Paccanaro A. Machine Learning and Network Medicine approaches for Drug Repositioning for COVID-19. Patterns (N Y). 2022 Jan 14;3(1):100396. doi: 10.1016/j.patter.2021.100396.

  • Sacramento CQ, Fintelman-Rodrigues N, Dias SSG, Temerozo JR, Da Silva AdPD, da Silva CS, Blanco C, Ferreira AC, Mattos M, Soares VC, Pereira-Dutra F, Miranda MD, Barreto-Vieira DF, da Silva MAN, Santos SS, Torres M, Chaves OA, Rajoli RKR, Paccanaro, A, Owen A, Bou-Habib, DC, Bozza, PT, Souza, TML. Unlike Chloroquine, Mefloquine Inhibits SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Physiologically Relevant Cells. Viruses 2022, 14, 374. https://doi.org/10.3390/v14020374

Book chapters

  • Santos SS, Takahashi DY, Sato JR, Ferreira CE, Fujita. Statistical methods in graphs: parameter estimation, model selection, and test. In: Yongtang Shi, Sueliang Li, Matthias Dehmer (Eds.). Mathematical foundations and applications of graph entropy. Wiley-Blackwell. 6: 183-202, 2016.

Software

CoGA

R package with statistical tests for comparing gene co-expression networks.

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statGraph

R package with statistical methods for networks, such as statistical test, parameter estimation, and model selection.

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