Tomás Alarcón

Centre de Recerca Matemàtica

Experimental Sciences & Mathematics

I obtained my PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Barcelona in 2000. After that I spent many wonderful years working as a postdoc at the University of Oxford, UK (2001-2003), University College London, UK (2003-2006), and Imperial College London, UK (2006-2009). I briefly held a senior researcher and group leader position at BCAM, Bilbao, Spain (2009-2010), after which I moved the Centre Recerca Matematica where I lead the Computational & Mathematical Biology Group. I have also held visiting fellowships at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, IIMAS (UNAM, Mexico DF), OCCAM (University of Oxford, UK), the Mathematical Institute (University of Oxford, UK), and the Mathematical Biosciences Institute (Columbus, Ohio, USA). In October 2015, I was appointed to an ICREA Research Professorship at the Centre de Recerca Matematica. 


Research interests

My research focuses on Mathematical Biology, particularly in multi-scale and stochastic modelling of tumour growth and tumour-induced angiogenesis. The main aim of my research is to understand the mechanisms involved in drug resitance and formulate therapeutic strategies which are robust to such mechanisms. Although tumour growth is my main field of specialisation, I am interested in other areas of Mathematical Biology, particularly regarding the effects of random fluctuations in cell regulatory systens and population dynamics, robustness and evolvability, and the stochastic dynamics of HIV-1-infection in patients treated with potent anti-retroviral therapy. 

Selected publications

- Perfahl H, Hughes BD, Alarcon T, Maini PK, Lloyd MC, Reuss M & Byrne HM 2017, '3D Hybrid Modelling of Vascular Network Formation', J. Theor. Biol., 414, 254–268.

- Menendez JA & Alarcon T 2017, 'Senescence-inflammatory regulation of reparative cellular reprogramming in aging and cancer', Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, 5:49

- Trejo-Soto C, Costa-Miracle E, Rodriguez-Villarreal I, Cid J, Castro M, Alarcon T & Hernandez-Machado A 2017, 'Front microrheology of the non-Newtonian behaviour of blood: Scaling theory of erythrocyte aggregation by aging', Soft Matter. 13, 3042-3047. 

- de la Cruz R, Guerrero P, Calvo J & Alarcon T 2017, 'Coarse-graining and hybrid methods for efficient simulation of stochastic multi-scale models of tumour growth', J. Comp. Phys. 350, 974-991.


Selected research activities

Co-organiser (jointly with Philip Maini, Oxford, Fred Nijhout, Duke, and Pablo Padilla, UNAM) of the MBI Emphasis Semester on Growth and 
Morphogenesis
, held at the Mathematical Biology Institute, Columbus, Ohio, USA, Spring Term, 2017. 

Co-organiser (jointly with Helen Byrne, Oxford, and James Glazier, Indiana) of the Workshop on Hybrid Multi-scale modelling and validation, held at the Mathematical Biology Institute, Columbus, Ohio, USA, 27-31  March, 2017.