Alfonso Valencia

Alfonso Valencia

Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación

Life & Medical Sciences

Computational biologist, pioneer scientist applying computer science to solve biological problems, recognized as leader in his field. Focused on the analysis of large collections of genomic data, especially protein interaction networks applied to (epi)Genomics, Cancer Biology and Precision Medicine, his group train the application of Natural Language technology to the biomedical domain. He earned a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (UAM) plus a PostDoctoral researcher in Bioinformatics (EMBL Heid). Prof. at ICREA, Scientific Director and Director’s of Life Sciences in BSC-CNS. Head of the Spanish node of the European Infrastructure for Life-Science Information, ELIXIR. Founding member and former President of the ISCB. Elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). Executive Editor of "Bioinformatics" OUP, Section Editor of Mol Oncol. Editor FEBS Letters, Prof. Honoris Causa by the Danish Technical University.

Research interests

His research interest is the development of Computational Biology methods and their application to biomedical problems. Some of the computational methods he developed are considered pioneering work in areas such as biological text mining, protein coevolution, disease networks and more recently modelling cellular systems (digital twins). He participates in some of the key cancer related international consortia. In terms of community services, he is one of the initial promoters of what is now the ELIXIR infrastructure, founder of the Spanish Bioinformatics network and founder member and former president of ISCB the professional association of Bioinformaticians and the Executive Editor of the main journal in the field (Bioinformatics OUP).

Selected publications

- Harms RL, Ferrari A et al. 2022, 'Digital biomarkers and sex impacts in Alzheimer's disease management - potential utility for innovative 3P medicine approach', Epma Journal, 13, 2, 299 - 313.

- Joshi RS, Rigau M et al. 2022, 'Look-alike humans identified by facial recognition algorithms show genetic similarities', Cell Reports, 40, 8, 111257.

- García Prieto CA, Martínez-Jiménez F, Valencia A & Porta-Pardo E 2022, 'Detection of oncogenic and clinically actionable mutations in cancer genomes critically depends on variant calling tools', Bioinformatics, 38(12), 2022, 3181-3191.

- Vazquez M, Krallinger M, Leitner F, Kuiper M, Valencia A & Laegreid A 2022, ExTRI: Extraction of transcription regulation interactions from literature. Biochim Biophys Acta Gene Regul Mech.1865, 1, 194778.    

- Ponce-de-Leon M, Montagud A, Akasiadis C, Schreiber J, Ntiniakou T & Valencia A 2022, 'Optimizing Dosage-Specific Treatments in a Multi-Scale Model of a Tumor Growth', Frontiers In Molecular Biosciences, 9, 836794.

- Smith M, Ponce-de-Leon M & Valencia A 2022, 'Evaluating the policy of closing bars and restaurants in Cataluna and its effects on mobility and COVID19 incidence', Scientific Reports, 12, 1, 9132.

Selected research activities

Coordination of the Data branch of the Spanish National Personalised Medicine Initiative (IMPACT-Data ) funded by the ISC III.

Coordinator of the Pillar III of the European Genomic Data Infrastructure GDI.

PI of the Center of Excellence for HPC / Exascale computing in Personalised Medicine PerMedCoE.

Pi of the UE consortium for the management of cancer data EOSC4Cancer.