Team

Principal Investigator:

JULIO R. BANGA, PhD (ORCID 0000-0002-4245-0320)

Research Professor, CSIC 

Julio R. Banga obtained a M.Sc. in Industrial Chemistry from the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain) in 1988, and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the same University in 1991. During 1992 he was a postdoc at the University of California, Davis. During the period 1993-1995 he was an Assistant Prof. of Chem. Eng. at the University of Vigo, and he also spent several short periods as visiting researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, MIT and UC Davis. In 1995, he obtained a tenured researcher position at the Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC). Since 2009, he is a CSIC Research Professor. He co-founded (with Antonio A. Alonso) the BioProcess Engineering Group at IIM-CSIC (Vigo, Spain) in 1996, and was its leader until March-2022, when he moved to MBG-CSIC (Pontevedra, Spain) to create the Computational Biology Lab. Julio has extensive experience in computational systems biology and bioprocess systems engineering, with emphasis on reverse engineering (dynamic modelling) and dynamic optimisation (optimal control) of biological systems. He is the author of more than 200 archival publications (check citation info here). He has supervised 12 PhD students (with four more ongoing) and has participated as principal investigator in 11 projects funded by the European Union and over 20 Spanish national projects. He was a member of the editorial committee of BMC Systems Biology (2007-2018). Currently he belongs to the Editorial Board of BMC Bioinformatics and to the IFAC Technical Committee on Control of Biotechnological Processes. He is ranked in the top 1% of Stanford’s list of the world’s top 2% scientists. 

Postdoctoral Researchers:

DAVID R. PENAS, PhD (ORCID 0000-0002-7256-3094)

David received a MSc in High-Performance Scientific Computing from University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) in 2012, achieving USC Best Master's thesis Award. In June 2017, he obtained a European PhD at the University of A Coruña (UDC), developed under the supervision of Julio R Banga (CSIC), Patricia González and Ramón Doallo (Computer Architecture Group, GAC-UDC). He obtained the top qualification of "Sobresaliente Cum Laude" and the UDC Best PhD Thesis Award 2016-2017. 
During 2017-2019, he was a postdoc researcher at the Institute of Mathematics (IMAT-USC), University of Santiago de Compostela, working on a set of projects related to the High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Operations Research (OR) fields. In 2020 he was a visiting researcher at the Edinburgh Research Group in Optimization (ERGO) at the University of Edinburgh. In April 2021 he returned to CSIC as a postdoctoral researcher.

PhD and Masters students:

CARLOS XOSÉ SEQUEIROS FERREIRO (ORCID 0000-0002-6530-6807)

Carlos holds a Bs in Physics (2016) and a Ms in Physics (2017) from University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain), and a MSc in Industrial Mathematics (2019) from University of Vigo (Spain). He is currently pursuing a PhD on the topic of "Design, analysis and optimization of biochemical pathways and genetic regulatory networks using stochastic models", co-supervised by Carlos Vázquez (UDC), Irene Otero (I2SysBio-CSIC) and Julio R. Banga.

ALBERTO PORTELA PELETEIRO

Alberto obtained a Bs in Mathematics (2021) and a MSc in Statistics and Operations Research (2023) from University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). He is currently investigating the use of mathematical optimization tools for the discovery of biological models, supervised by Julio R. Banga.

ANA PAREDES VAZQUEZ

Ana earned her Physics degree from the University of Santiago de Compostela in 2022. She is currently working on her master's thesis in Industrial Mathematics, focusing on the mathematical modeling of microbial community dynamics. Her research is conducted under the guidance of Julio R. Banga (MBG-CSIC) and Eva Balsa Canto (IIM-CSIC).

External PhD students:

ROBERTO PRADO RODRÍGUEZ

Roberto received a MSc in High-Performance Computing from University of A Coruña (UDC) in 2021. He has previous experience in the IT industry (INDRA, Aldaba). He is currently pursuing a PhD at UDC on the topic "Exploiting HPC capabilities for combinatorial optimization in computational systems biology", co-supervised by Patricia González (UDC) and Julio R. Banga.

Recent PhD Alumni

GEMMA MASSONIS FEIXAS (ORCID 0000-0001-8740-825X )

Gemma obtained a Bs in Mathematics from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in 2018 and a Ms in Industrial Mathematics from  Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in 2020. On 21 July 2023, she defended her PhD Thesis "CONTRIBUTIONS TO MECHANISTIC MODELLING IN SYSTEMS BIOLOGY: IDENTIFIABILITY, SYMMESTRIES AND UNCERTAINTY QUANTIFICATION", co-supervised by Alex F. Villaverde (UVigo) and Julio R. Banga, at the University of Vigo.Other previous alumni and collaborators are listed below.

Visiting Researchers:

AHMED TATA SAYED

Ahmed is a PhD student at Khalifa University (Abu Dhabbi) supervised by Prof. Jorge Rodríguez R., PI of the Environmental Bioprocess Modelling Lab . Ahmed visited our group during Sept-Nov 2022, and we collaborated on the use of optimization methods for bioenergetic evaluation of microbial pathways variants.

Group photo, Nov 2022

(left to right: Carlos,Julio, Gemma, David, Ahmed)

Group photo, May 2022

(left to right: Julio, Gemma, David, Carlos)

Alumni and former postdocs:

  • Dr. Gemma Massonis Feixas (web link)
  • Dr. Alejandro F. Villaverde (web link)
  • Dr. Irene Otero-Muras (web link)
  • Dr. David Saque Henriques
  • Dr. Attila Gabor 
  • Nikolaos Tsiantis
  • Jake Pitt
  • Dr. Oana Chis 
  • Maria Gundian Martin de Hijas Liste 
  • Oscar Hernandez Sendin 
  • Dr. Maria Rodriguez Fernandez (web link)
  • Dr. Jose A. Egea Larrosa (web link)
  • Tomas Hirmajer 
  • Markus Rehberg  
  • Dr. Oliver Exler
  • Martin Schluter 
  • Dr. Carlos Vilas Fernández
  • Dr. Luis Taboada Antelo
  • Dr. Sonia Garcia Garcia 
  • Dr. Carmen Gutierrez Moles
  • Dr. Eva Balsa Canto  (web link)
  • Dr. Jose Saa Merino

Current collaborators:

  • Julio Saez-Rodríguez (Heidelberg University)
  • Jan Hasenauer (Univ. Bonn)
  • Jesús Picó (UPV, Valencia)
  • Patricia Gonzalez y Ramón Doallo (UDC, A Coruña)
  • Carlos Vázquez Cendón (UDC, A Coruña)
  • Alex F. Villaverde (UVigo, Vigo)
  • Sebastian Sager (OVGU, Magdeburg)
  • Hidde de Jong (INRIA, Grenoble)
  • Viktor Jirsa and  Meysam Hashemi (Aix-Marseille Univ.)

Past collaborators:

  • Chris Barnes (UCL, London) and Ruben Perez-Carrasco (Imperial College London)
  • Jorge Rodríguez R. (Khalifa University, UAE)
  • Paul Lang and Bela Novak (Univ. of Oxford)
  • Natalio Krasnogor (Newcastle Univ.) and Shouyong Jiang (Univ. Aberdeen)