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 Text Mining methodology to biomedical problems. 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, home of the MareNostrum Supercomputer. Head of the Spanish node of the European Infrastructure for Life-Science Information,ELIXIR. Founding member and President of the ISCB. Elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). Exec. Editor of "Bioinformatics", OUP of FEBS Letters, Prof. Honoris Causa by the Danish Technical University and advisory board in several Institutions.


Research interests

*Personalized Medicine Initiative: Organize resources for the analysis of large scale genomics and phenotypic data and its translation to clinic.*NLP/text mining: Analyzing large biomedical corpora to detect bioentities relations and specific conditions, e.g. disease specific genes affected in particular contexts.*New approaches to predict protein structures and interactions: exploration of the sequence and structure spaces combined with simulations highly improve prediction methods, useful in applications such as drug design.*Network Biology: Investigation of AI approaches for the analysis of biological networks, ontology constructions and diseases comorbidity.*Evaluation of research and social projects: Analyzing large data sets to assess the impact of specific projects, monitoring, and planning. *Building a sustainable bioinformatic infrastructure: In collaboration with the INB and the EBI, systematically catalog, interoperate and benchmark methods and data resources.

Selected publications

– Bazaga A, Valencia A & Rementeria M-J  2019, ‘BIOLITMAP: a web-based geolocated, temporal and thematic visualization of the evolution of bioinformatics publications’, Bioinformatics, 35, 14, 2518 – 2520.

– Greco A, Sanchez Valle J, Pancaldi V, Baudot A, Barillot E, Caselle M, Valencia A, Zinovyev A & Cantini L 2019, ‘Molecular Inverse Comorbidity between Alzheimer’s Disease and Lung Cancer: New Insights from Matrix Factorization’, International Journal Of Molecular Sciences, 20, 13, 3114.

– Wren JD, Valencia A & Kelso J 2019, ‘Reviewer-coerced citation: case report, update on journal policy and suggestions for future prevention’, Bioinformatics, 35, 18, 3217 – 3218.

– Saunders G et al 2019, ‘Leveraging European European infrastructures to access 1 million human genomes by 2022’, Nature Reviews Genetics, 20, 11, 692 – 701.

– Rigau M, Juan D, Valencia A & Rico D 2019, ‘Intronic CNVs and gene expression variation in human populations‘, PLoS Genet. 15(1):e1007902.