Bruno Sobral, PhD, is a professor of biostatistics & informatics at the Colorado School of Public Health, a professor of microbiology at Colorado State University, and a core faculty member in the School of Global Environmental Sustainability at Colorado State University . He was the founding director for CSU’s One Health Institute. He formerly served as an assistant vice president and head of biosystem informatics and human microbial ecology at the Nestlé Institute of Health Sciences in Lausanne, Switzerland. Sobral also was the founding executive and scientific director of the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech, where he was a professor of plant pathology, physiology and weed science. His research at the Bioinformatics Institute focused on symbiosis from a biological perspective and cyberinfrastructure from a computational perspective. He has contributed to symbiotic systems, infectious diseases, computational biology, bioinformatics, software development and cyberinfrastructure. He also served as vice president for scientific programs at the National Institute for Genome Resources in Santa Fe, NM, where he shifted from laboratory science to integrated computational and laboratory sciences.

Sobral is a systems thinker with significant scientific and executive experience building and managing research institutes, from strategy co-creation through implementation/evolution. He has been successful over the last 30 years leading interdisciplinary teams with the goals of scientific discovery and informatics infrastructure development, deployment, and evolution. In the last several years, Sobral has increasingly sought to develop social infrastructure and social innovation for the benefit of society (communities) in pursuit of health cultivation, shifting from a pathogenesis viewpoint to a salutogenesis framework. His objective is to optimize his capacity to impact the health of residents in Colorado communities, with a special focus on Latinx, using participatory action research frameworks.