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I was born and raised in Terracina, a small seaside town in Italy, but my research interests have taken me to various cities and continents. I completed my BSc and MSc in Evolutionary Biology at the University of Rome Sapienza, focusing on the phylogeography of the common mole for my dissertation.

In the summer of 2008, I moved to the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, for a fully-funded summer internship on horizontal gene transfer in plants. A year later, I returned with a PhD fellowship awarded by the Irish Council for Research and Engineering to work in the lab of Davide Pisani. Throughout my PhD, I investigated the origin of opsin and the relationships between non-bilateria metazoans. At the conclusion of my doctoral studies, I had the privilege of conducting a brief project with Peter Holland in his laboratory at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford.

As a postdoc, I worked in the Eric Davidson laboratory at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where I delved into gene regulatory networks (GRNs) and their evolution.

Finally, in 2018, I was awarded with a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, prompting my return to Europe. After spending a year and a half at the School of Earth Science in Bristol as part of the Paleobiology group, I accepted a proleptic position in the Department of Genetics and Genome Biology at the Â鶹ÊÓƵ in October 2019. In 2023, I was promoted to associate professor.

Google Scholar page: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=sNYVnJoAAAAJ&hl=it

 

1.     Aleotti, A., Goulty, M., Lewis, C., Giorgini, F., Feuda, R., 2023. The origin, evolution and molecular diversity of the chemokine system. (in press Life Science Aliances)

2.     Yu, D., Ren, Y., Uesaka, M., Beavan, A.J.S., Muffato, M., Shen, J., Li, Y., Sato, I., Wan, W., Clark, J.W., Keating, J.N., Carlisle, E.M., Dearden, R.P., Giles, S., Randle, E., Sansom, R.S., Feuda, R., Fleming, J.F., Sugahara, F., Cummins, C., Patricio, M., Akanni, W., D’Aniello, S., Bertolucci, C., Irie, N., Alev, C., Sheng, G., Mendoza, A. de, Maeso, I., Irimia, M., Fromm, B., Peterson, K.J., Das, S., Hirano, M., Rast, J.P., Cooper, M.D., Paps, J., Pisani, D., Kuratani, S., Martin, F.J., Wang, W., Donoghue, P.C.J., Zhang, Y.E., Pascual-Anaya, J., 2023. Hagfish genome illuminates vertebrate whole genome duplications and their evolutionary consequences. (in press Nature Ecology and Evolution)

3.     Zadra, N., Tatti, A., Silverj, A., Piccinno, R., Devilliers, J., Lewis, C., Arnoldi, D., Montarsi, F., Escuer, P., Fusco, G., De Sanctis, V., Feuda, R., Sánchez-Gracia, A., Rizzoli, A., Rota-Stabelli, O., 2023. Shallow Whole-Genome Sequencing of Aedes japonicus and Aedes koreicus from Italy and an Updated Picture of Their Evolution Based on Mitogenomics and Barcoding. Insects 14, 904.

4.     Goulty, M., Botton-Amiot, G., Rosato, E., Sprecher, S.G., Feuda, R., 2023. The monoaminergic system is a bilaterian innovation. Nat Commun 14, 3284.

5.     De Vivo, G., Crocetta, F., Ferretti, M., Feuda, R., D’Aniello, S., 2023. Duplication and Losses of Opsin Genes in Lophotrochozoan Evolution. Molecular Biology and Evolution 40, msad066.

6.     Pisani, D., Rossi, M.E., Marlétaz, F., Feuda, R., 2022. Phylogenomics: Is less more when using large-scale datasets? Current Biology 32, R1340–R1342.

7.     Feuda, R., Peter I.S. Feuda, R., Peter, I.S., 2022. Homologous gene regulatory networks control development of apical organs and brains in Bilateria. Science Advances 8, eabo2416.

8.     Giacomelli, M., Rossi, M.E., Lozano-Fernandez, J., Feuda, R., and Pisani, D. (2022). Resolving tricky nodes in the tree of life through amino acid recoding. iScience .

9.     Feuda, R. The temporal dynamics of the sea urchin regulome (2022). Biology Open. .

10.  Feuda, R., Menon, A. K. & Göpfert, M. C. Rethinking Opsins. Molecular Biology and Evolution 39, (2022).

11.  Musser, J. M., Schippers, K. J., Nickel, M., Mizzon, G., Kohn, A. B., Pape, C., Hammel, J. U., Wolf, F., Liang, C., Hernández-Plaza, A., Achim, K., Schieber, N. L., Francis, W. R., R, S. V., Kling, S., Renkert, M., Feuda, R., Gaspar, I., Burkhardt, P., Bork, P., Beck, M., Kreshuk, A., Wörheide, G., Huerta-Cepas, J., Schwab, Y., Moroz, L. L. & Arendt, D. Profiling cellular diversity in sponges informs animal cell type and nervous system evolution. Science (2021).

12.  Almudi, I., Vizueta, J., Wyatt, C.D.R., de Mendoza, A., Marlétaz, F., Firbas, P.N., Feuda, R., Masiero, G., Medina, P., Alcaina-Caro, A., et al. (2020). Genomic adaptations to aquatic and aerial life in mayflies and the origin of insect wings. Nature Communications 11, 2631. DOI:

13.  Feuda, R., Goulty, M., Zadra, N., Gasparetti, T., Rosato, E., Segata, N., Rizzoli, A., Pisani, D., Ometto, L., and Stabelli, O.R. (2020). Phylogenomics of Opsin Genes in Diptera Reveals Lineage-Specific Events and Contrasting Evolutionary Dynamics in Anopheles and Drosophila. Genome Biology and Evolution DOI: 

14.  Pisani, D., Rota-Stabelli, O., and Feuda, R. (2020). Sensory Neuroscience: A Taste for Light and the Origin of Animal Vision. Current Biology 30, R773–R775. DOI:   

15.  Fleming, J.F., Feuda, R., Roberts, N.W., and Pisani, D. (2020). A Novel Approach to Investigate the Effect of Tree Reconstruction Artifacts in Single-Gene Analysis Clarifies Opsin Evolution in Nonbilaterian Metazoans. Genome Biology and Evolution 12, 3906–3916. DOI:

16.  Valencia, J.E., Feuda, R., Mellott, D.O., Burke, R.D., Peter, I.S., 2021. Ciliary photoreceptors in sea urchin larvae indicate pan-deuterostome cell type conservation. BMC Biology 19, 257.

17.  Feuda, R., Dohrmann, M., Pett, W., Philippe, H., Rota-Stabelli, O., Lartillot, N., Wörheide, G. & Pisani, D. Improved Modeling of Compositional Heterogeneity Supports Sponges as Sister to All Other Animals. Current Biology 27, 3864-3870.e4 (2017).

18.  Pisani, D., Pett, W., Dohrmann, M., Feuda, R., Rota-Stabelli, O., Philippe, H., Lartillot, N. & Wörheide, G. Reply to Halanych et al.: Ctenophore misplacement is corroborated by independent datasets. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 113, E948–E949 (2016).

19.  Feuda, R., Marletaz, F., Bentley, M. A. & Holland, P. W. Conservation, duplication, and divergence of five opsin genes in insect evolution. Genome biology and evolution 8, 579–587 (2016).

20.  Xu, P., Feuda, R., Lu, B., Xiao, H., Graham, R. I. & Wu, K. Functional opsin retrogene in nocturnal moth. Mobile DNA 7, 18 (2016).  .

21.  Pisani, D., Pett, W., Dohrmann, M., Feuda, R., Rota-Stabelli, O., Philippe, H., Lartillot, N. & Wörheide, G. Genomic data do not support comb jellies as the sister group to all other animals. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 112, 15402–15407 (2015).

22.  Feuda, R, Bannikova, A. A., Zemlemerova, E. D., Febbraro, M. D., Loy, A., Hutterer, R., Aloise, G., Zykov, A. E., Annesi, F. & Colangelo, P. Tracing the evolutionary history of the mole, Talpa europaea, through mitochondrial DNA phylogeography and species distribution modelling. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 114, 495–512 (2015)

23.  Feuda, R. & Smith, A. B. Phylogenetic Signal Dissection Identifies the Root of Starfishes. PLos One (2015).

24.  Feuda, R., Rota-Stabelli, O., Oakley, T. H. & Pisani, D. The comb jelly opsins and the origins of animal phototransduction. Genome biology and evolution 6, 1964–1971 (2014).

25.  Feuda, R., Hamilton, S. C., McInerney, J. O. & Pisani, D. Metazoan opsin evolution reveals a simple route to animal vision. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 109, 18868–72 (2012).

26.  Pisani, D., Feuda, R., Peterson, K. J. & Smith, A. B. Resolving phylogenetic signal from noise when divergence is rapid: a new look at the old problem of echinoderm class relationships. Mol Phylogenet Evol 62, 27–34 (2012).

-Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

-Bioinformatics