Welcome, Prof. Dr. Célio Dias Santos Júnior, to the Meat Innovation Group!

发布时间：2025.05.14

To further strengthen the interdisciplinary integration of artificial intelligence and meat science, the Meat Innovation Group at the College of Food Science and Technology, Huazhong Agricultural University, warmly welcomes its newest core member — Prof. Dr. Célio Dias Santos Júnior, who has officially joined our team as a full professor.

Dr. Santos-Júnior received his Ph.D. in April 2019 from the Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil. From June 2019 to June 2023, he worked at Fudan University in China as a postdoctoral researcher and later as a research scientist, focusing on AI applications in microbial function discovery and food safety. Since July 2023, he has been conducting postdoctoral research at the Federal University of São Carlos, and from July 2024, he served as an independent researcher and doctoral advisor, while also acting as Head of Life Sciences Technology at Biofy Technologies, promoting the industrial application of AI in biomedicine and boosting academic application of AI and big data to different sectors of life sciences.

He brings rich international experience, having studied and worked in Brazil, Portugal, Spain, and China, with strong capabilities in global collaboration and cross-cultural scientific exchange.

Dr. Santos-Júnior’s research focuses on AI-powered discovery of novel antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) to address global food safety challenges such as microbial spoilage, foodborne illness, and antibiotic resistance. He pioneered a three-phase framework of “resource integration → tool development → framework construction” for AMP discovery, achieving world-leading accomplishments:

●Built the Amazon non-redundant genome catalog (AMnrGC) and participated in the global small ORF catalog (GMSC);

● Developed Macrel, a machine learning-based tool for AMP prediction from metagenomic data;

●Established AMPSphere, the world’s largest non-redundant AMP database with over 860,000 candidate peptides, of which 99.3% are novel, and an experimental validation rate of 79%.

His work has been published as first or corresponding author in Cell, Microbiome, Trends in Food Science and Technology, and other leading journals, and was widely reported by Nature’s Research Highlights, The Guardian, and Agencia EFE.

His arrival will significantly enhance our research in meat preservation, intelligent screening of natural antimicrobials, and functional peptide innovation, and further advance the international impact of AI-food science integration at our university.

🎉 We warmly welcome Prof. Dr. Célio Dias Santos Júnior to our team!

🌟欢迎 Dr. Célio Dias Santos Júnior 教授加入 Meat Innovation Group！

为进一步推动人工智能与肉品科学的深度交叉融合，华中农业大学食品科学与技术学院 Meat Innovation Group 近日迎来一位重要新成员——Dr. Célio Dias Santos Júnior，他以全职教授（Full Professor）身份正式加入我院与本团队。

Dr. Santos-Júnior 于2019年4月获得巴西圣卡洛斯联邦大学博士学位。2019年6月至2023年6月，他在中国复旦大学担任博士后与研究员（Researcher），从事人工智能在食品微生物功能因子筛选等方向的研究。2023年7月起，他回到圣卡洛斯联邦大学从事博士后研究，并于2024年7月晋升为独立研究员与博士生导师，同时担任Biofy Technologies公司生命科学技术部门负责人，积极推动科研成果在生命科学产业中的转化落地。

他具有丰富的国际学习与科研背景，曾在巴西、葡萄牙、西班牙和中国等国家学习和工作，具备广泛的全球合作经验与跨文化科研交流能力。

Dr. Santos-Júnior 长期致力于人工智能驱动的抗菌肽（AMP）新资源挖掘研究，其研究聚焦于应对因微生物污染引发的食品腐败、食源性疾病以及抗生素耐药性基因扩散等全球公共卫生挑战。他率先构建了“资源整合→工具开发→框架建立”的三阶段AMP智能发现体系，取得了一系列国际领先的成果：

●创建了亚马逊河微生物非冗余基因目录（AMnrGC）与全球微生物小开放阅读框目录（GMSC）；

●开发了结合机器学习与宏基因组分析的抗菌肽筛选工具Macrel；

● 建立了全球首个大规模非冗余宏基因组AMP资源库AMPSphere，包含超过86万条候选肽段，其中99.3%为首次发现，实验活性验证率高达79%。

相关成果以第一或通讯作者身份发表于Cell、Microbiome、Trends in Food Science and Technology等国际一流期刊，并被Nature “Research Highlights”、英国卫报（The Guardian）、欧洲新闻社（Agencia EFE）等多家国际主流媒体广泛报道。

他的加入将为我院在肉品贮藏与保鲜、天然抗菌因子智能筛选、食品功能肽开发等研究方向注入强劲动力，进一步推动我校食品科学与人工智能交叉研究的国际化发展。

🎉 让我们热烈欢迎 Dr. Célio Dias Santos Júnior 教授的加入！