Team

Principal Investigator:

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

Research Professor, CSIC

Julio R. Banga obtained a MSc in Industrial Chemistry from the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain) in 1988, and a PhD 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 PLOS Computational Biology, 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:

ANA PAREDES VAZQUEZ

Ana earned her Physics BSc degree from the University of Santiago de Compostela in 2022, and a MSc in Industrial Mathematics in 2024. Currently she is pursuing a PhD focusing on the mathematical modeling of microbial community dynamics and their simulation, optimization and control. Her research is conducted under the guidance of Julio R. Banga (MBG-CSIC) and Eva Balsa Canto (IIM-CSIC).

ANDREA POLO RODRÍGUEZ

Andrea earned a BSc degree in Mathematics in 2023, and a MSc in Industrial Mathematics in 2025, both from the University of Santiago de Compostela. Her master's thesis studied the use of global optimization in computational systems biology. Her current PhD research is focused on developing new methods for automatic discovery and optimization of dynamic models in computational biology.

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.

JAE-Intro students:

SARA EGUIZABAL LORENZO (student of MSc in Biomedical Engineering, Univ. of Vigo).

Recent Alumni

ALBERTO PORTELA PELETEIRO

Alberto obtained a BSc in Mathematics (2021) and a MSc in Statistics and Operations Research (2023) from University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). During 2023-2024 he investigated the use of mathematical optimization tools for the discovery of biological models, supervised by Julio R. Banga.

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

Carlos holds a BSc in Physics (2016) and a MSc in Physics (2017) from University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain), and a MSc in Industrial Mathematics (2019) from University of Vigo (Spain). He carried out his PhD research at MBG-CSIC. On April 22, 2024, he defended his PhD Thesis entitled "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.

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

Gemma obtained a BSc in Mathematics from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in 2018 and a MSc in Industrial Mathematics from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in 2020. She carried out his PhD research at MBG-CSIC. 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 (MBG-CSIC), at the University of Vigo.Other previous alumni and collaborators are listed below.

For some recent group pictures, check the gallery.

Alumni and former postdocs:

Dr. Carlos X. Sequeiros Ferreiro
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:

Marcos Matabuena (Harvard Univ.)
Sebastian Sager (OVGU, Magdeburg)
Jan Hasenauer (Univ. Bonn)
Andrés Gómez (CESGA)
Jesús Picó (UPV, Valencia)
Patricia Gonzalez y Ramón Doallo (UDC, A Coruña)
Alex F. Villaverde (UVigo, Vigo)
Julio González-Díaz (USC, Santiago de Compostela)

Past collaborators:

Viktor Jirsa and Meysam Hashemi (Aix-Marseille Univ.)
Hidde de Jong (INRIA, Grenoble)
Julio Saez-Rodríguez (Heidelberg University)
Carlos Vázquez Cendón (UDC, A Coruña)
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)
Edda Klipp (Humbolt University, Berlin)
Sakis Mantalaris (Imperial College, London)
Johannes Jaeger (CRG Barcelona)
Pedro Mendes (Univ. of Manchester)
Klaus Mauch (Insilico Biotechnology AG, Stuttgart)
Joerg Stelling (ETH Zurich)
Christoph Kaleta (Friedrich Schiller University, Jena)
K. Hangos and G. Szederkényi (SZTAKI, Budapest)
John Ross (Stanford University)
Federico Moran (UCM, Madrid)
Andreas Kremling (TU Munich)
Olaf Wolkenhauer (Rostock University, Germany)
Kenneth Holmström (Mälardalen University, Sweden)
Frank Doyle (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA)
Tibor Csendes (University of Szeged, Hungary)
V. S. Vassiliadis (University of Cambridge, UK)
Paul I. Barton (M.I.T., USA)
Warren D. Seider (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
B. Nicolai (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium)
J. Van Impe (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium)
J. Mora (CIMNE-UPC, Barcelona, Spain)
Klaus Keller (Princeton University)
Néstor Torres (ULL, Tenerife, Spain)
R. Paul Singh (University of California at Davis, USA)

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