People

Toni Gabaldón, Principal Investigator

ICREA Research professor, group leader at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB), and the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC), and associate professor at the UPF. He leads the comparative genomics groups. His main research interests are in the fields of genomics and evolution with significant contributions to the understanding of how genes, pathways, biological organisms and communities evolve and perform their functions.

Ester Saus, Research Assistant

My research is based on implementing new high-throughput sequencing strategies, specially in the transcriptomics field, to characterize fungal pathogens species, elucidate the secondary structure of RNAs, and to study the evolution of lncRNAs across related species.

Ewa Ksiezopolska, Predoctoral Researcher

Interested in the evolution of antifungal resistance.

Hrant Hovhannisyan, Predoctoral Researcher

The main goal of my PhD project is to shed light on host-pathogen interactions between humans and different Candida species and investigate mechanisms of pathogenicity emergence in hybrid yeasts using methods of comparative transcriptomics.

Jesse Willis, Predoctoral Researcher

I am working on a few projects which primarily involve metagenomics, prediction of the secondary structure of long non-coding RNAs, and analyses of next generation sequencing data.

Marina Marcet-Houben, Research Engineer

I use phylogenomics and comparative genomics tools in order to study how different organisms have evolved. I am specially interested in fungal species and have worked on topics related to horizontal gene transfer, whole genome duplication and hybridization.

Uciel Chorostecki, Postdoctoral Researcher

Interested in evolution of lncRNAs. My research is focused in the study of lncRNAs structures from different species.

Manu Molina, Research Engineer

Web bioinformatician. I’m developing and administrating our websites (Drupal, WordPress, VueJs), as well the databases (MySQL, MongoDB), pipelines (Python, Shell, Nextflow) and everything related with IT inside the group (VM, Docker).

Miquel Àngel Schikora, PREDOCTORAL RESEARCHER

Olfat Khannous, BIOINFORMATICIAN

Biotechnologist with expertise in Bioinformatics and passionate of scientific diffusion. Currenlty working in the development and implementation of computational tools for metagenomics in a diagnostic context. Highly interested in Genomics and Biomedical research in general.

Valentina del Olmo, Postdoctoral Researcher

Trained in genetics and the study of transcription regulatory networks in fungal pathogens. I am now interested in studying the genome of fungal hybrids through comparative genomics from an evolutionary perspective.

Diego Fuentes, Bioinformatician

I am a geneticist with a bioinformatic background (Python, Shell and R). I am interested into machine learning, big data analysis, database management, NGS pipelines and statistical analysis.

Jerónimo Parra Parra, Master Student

I enjoy developing software for clinic aplications

Anna Vlasova, Bioinformatician

Research bioinformatician, interested in data integration, high throughput analysis, and method development that facilitate understanding of biological data.

Guifré Torruella, Postdoctoral researcher

As an evolutionary protistologist, my goal is to improve our knowledge on the origin & early eukaryote evolution, from its last common ancestor to our current biodiversity. My research involves sampling and culturing protists, sequencing and analysing their transcriptomes and genomes to tackle phylogenetic and comparative genomics questions.

Giacomo Mutti, Master Student

Bioinformatics master student with background in biology. I’m mainly interested in evolutionary biology and I am keen on using different programming resources and statistics to unravel genome evolution and phylogenomics questions.

Ismael Collado Cala, Student

Student of Web Applications Development – BioInformatics (CFGS). Currently graduated in Multiplatform application development. Highly interested in Big Data and Data Analysis.

Maria Artigues, Undergraduate Student

Undergraduate student in Human Biology. Currently interested in pursuing a career in Bioinformatics.

Juan Carlos Núñez Rodríguez, Predoctoral Researcher

My interests are focused on studying which traits determine the most important phenotypic changes in Candida spp. Such as pathogenicity, adherence, stress response or studying the processes of acquiring resistance to antifungal drugs.

Ana Álvarez, Master Student

Biologist with expertise in Microbiology and Bioinformatics, currently working on the study of the human microbiome in health and disease. Highly interested in the use and development of methods to approach comparative genomics in microorganisms.