Jacopo Pantaleoni is a Senior Architect at NVIDIA, where he currently leads the development of NVBIO, a high performance library for sequence analysis. As part of this effort he has developed the first and fastest massively parallel algorithm for incremental BWT and FM-index construction of large-scale genomic databases (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.0562.pdf), as well as nvBowtie, a full-featured re-engineering of the popular Bowtie2 aligner targeting multi-GPU systems. He has also been driving collaborations with the Broad, Life Technologies and other research centers and institutes in order to spread the adoption of GPU acceleration in bioinformatics. Prior to that, he has worked as a Senior Research Scientist at NVIDIA Research, where he has been studying new stochastic methods for physically based light transport simulations, developing novel rendering techniques for the film visual effects industry (contributing key technology - the PantaRay engine - for the Oscar winning special effects in Avatar), providing new algorithms for real time ray tracing and rasterization, and studying the feasibility of complex, programmable software pipelines on massively parallel processors. Prior to joining NVIDIA in 2008, he has founded Lightflow Technologies in 1999, developing one of the first publically available global illumination engines. He later worked as a rendering expert in the film industry, has co-authored a book on production rendering and joined mental images in 2005 where he worked as Lead Rendering Research Scientist to develop interactive photorealistic rendering solutions. Jacopo studied Mathematics at the University of Padova, Italy.