Prof. Dr. Vasco Ariston de Carvalho Azevedo is a professor and coordinator of the Graduate Program in Bioinformatics at UFMG. He holds a degree in Veterinary Medicine from the School of Veterinary Medicine of the Federal University of Bahia (1986), a master’s degree (1989) and a doctorate (1993) in Microorganism Genetics from the Institut National Agronomique Paris Grignon. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine (USA, 1994) and Associate Professor at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences of the University of São Paulo (2004). He was president of the advisory committee for the area of Biological and Agricultural Sciences of the Dean of Research at UFMG, a member of the Internationalization Committee of UFMG from 2007 to 2010, and coordinator of the Graduate Program in Genetics at the Department of General Biology at ICB/UFMG from October 2006 to April 2010. He has experience in genetics, with emphasis on molecular and microorganism genetics, working mainly on the following topics: genomics; transcriptomics; proteomics; functional analyses of genes; study of virulence and pathogenicity, molecular biotechnology and biosafety. He currently works with the following microorganisms: Brucella abortus, Corynebacterium pseudotuberculosis, Lactococcus lactis, and Lactobacillus.