Dr Pavelka received his Degree in Biotechnology from the University of Milano-Bicocca in 2001 and his Ph.D. in Immunology from the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” in 2006. He formerly worked as a graduate student in Prof Paola Castagnoli’s lab at the University of Milano-Bicocca, where he developed his microarray data analysis skills and contributed to numerous Functional Genomics projects aimed at understanding the role of dendritic cells in host-pathogen interactions. Dr Pavelka then joined Prof Rong Li’s group at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in May 2006, where he published seminal papers on the role of aneuploidy in evolution of yeast cells. While at the Stowers Institute, he collaborated with Dr Michael Washburn, publishing important contributions to the proteomics data analysis field. In October 2010, Dr Pavelka was awarded the A*STAR Investigatorship (Biomedical Sciences) and set up his lab at the Singapore Immunology Network in May 2011, to study evolution of host-pathogen interactions and the genome changes that underlie such evolutionary processes.