Dr. Sobral is a systems thinker with significant scientific and executive experience building and managing research institutes, research strategy, and implementation and execution of such strategies over last 28 years, primarily leading interactions between wet-lab and computational scientists with the goals of scientific discovery and informatics infrastructure development, deployment and evolution. In the last five years Dr. Sobral has increasingly focused on social infrastructure development and implementation in increasingly participatory action research models, mostly from a salutogenic perspective. Dr. Sobral’s recent research has largely been focused around “big data” from the engineering and informatics perspective and host-microbe-environment interactions (symbiosis) from the biological science perspective. Additionally, the strategy has been set to branch out from the human microbiome to enable research into key chronic ailments with respect to their microbial component. Ultimately the driving question is an ecological approach and conceptualization of “what is health?” Dr. Sobral sees the opportunity for delivering new products that support multi-scale interventions especially for chronic diseases. Dr. Sobral was the founding Executive Director of the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute and is a member of the NIMML Institute.