Els ICREA

Els professors d'investigació ICREA formen una comunitat dinàmica de científics i investigadors de totes les àrees del coneixement, que contribueixen al progrés de la humanitat amb els seus estudis, interpretacions i preguntes. Entreu i descobriu-ne els increïbles descobriments i troballes:

Torrents Arenales, David

Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS)

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Torrents Arenales, David
Research Professor at
Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS)
Life & Medical Sciences
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Research interests

Genomes are the central molecules of life because they carry all the information necessary for the development, the survival and the reproduction of all organisms. Over the lasts 20 years, the study of the genome in a biomedical context has provided valuable information about the genetic and molecular basis of diseases. Current sequencing of DNA allows the incorporation of the genome analysis as an integrated and regular protocol within the health-care system, resulting in a Precision Medicine, where the genomic information will be determinant for a more accurate diagnosis and for the selection of a more precise treatment. In this context, our group and my research activity is focused on the design and implementation of analysis protocols, including artificial intelligence approaches to, ultimately, improve our understanding of the relationship between genomic variation and disease, and to generate the basis for more precise medical care.

Key words
Genomics, Bioinformatics, Cancer Genomics, Genetics, Complex Diseases, Personalized Medicine

ORCID
: 0000-0002-6086-9037

RESEARCHER ID
: G-5785-2015
Torres, Diego F.

Institut de Ciències de l'Espai (CSIC - ICE)

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Torres, Diego F.
Research Professor at
Institut de Ciències de l'Espai (CSIC - ICE)
Experimental Sciences & Mathematics
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Research interests

The familiar sights of peacefully shining stars would be replaced by something extreme and variable should you look with gamma-ray eyes. You would be glancing at the most energetic phenomena known in astrophysics: accreting masses around black holes, pulsars, close binaries, regions of stellar formation, explosions of supernovae, and others. I develop theoretical models for these scenarios, and test them with observations using ground-based telescopes and satellites. My research focuses on compact objects and cosmic rays. My earlier research includes gravitation and cosmology; particularly, scalar-tensor theories and non-minimal couplings, scalar dark matter, boson stars, gravitational lensing, and wormholes. I published several papers on all these topics. My research group hosted 40+ scientists since its foundation in 2006. You can know more about all this, including links to my publications, from my own or the institute's webpage, https://sites.google.com/view/dft-research https://www.ice.csic.es/

Key words
high energy astrophysics, astronomy, cosmic-rays, gamma-rays, neutrinos

ORCID
: 0000-0002-1522-9065

RESEARCHER ID
: O-9422-2016
Trepat, Xavier

Institut de Bioenginyeria de Catalunya (IBEC)

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Trepat, Xavier
Research Professor at
Institut de Bioenginyeria de Catalunya (IBEC)
Engineering Sciences
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Research interests

We aim at understanding how physical forces and molecular control modules cooperate to drive biological function. We develop new technologies to map and perturb the main physical properties that determine how cells and tissues grow, move, invade and remodel. By combining this physical information with systematic molecular perturbations and computational models we explore the principles that govern the interplay between chemical and physical cues in living tissues. We study how these principles are regulated in physiology and development, and how they are derailed in cancer.

Key words
Biophysics, Biomechanics, Cell Migration, Nanotechnology, Biomaterials

ORCID
: 0000-0002-7621-5214

RESEARCHER ID
: I-3912-2015
Usón Finkenzeller, Isabel

Institut de Biologia Molecular de Barcelona (CSIC - IBMB)

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Usón Finkenzeller, Isabel
Research Professor at
Institut de Biologia Molecular de Barcelona (CSIC - IBMB)
Life & Medical Sciences
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Research interests

Structural biology provides eyes to the life sciences. This field, traditionally dominated by crystallography, has been enriched by atomic resolution microscopy and accurate structure predictions using deep learning to relate knowledge. New challenges can be conquered harnessing further sources of information to experiments and predictions in the development ofrational, integrated structural methods implemented in our own software ARCIMBOLDO and in SHELX. Our methods exploit the stereochemical knowledge present in small, local folds to determine and interpret structure within chemical, biomedical and biotechnological research. To extricate experimental information from model bias and data pathologies we propose a change of the validation paradigm (average stereochemistry) into verification (outperform alternative hypotheses) and are extending fragment-based algorithms into the field of electron diffraction.

Key words
Crystallography, phasing, refinement, computational methods, problem structures
Valcárcel Juárez, Juan

Centre de Regulació Genòmica (CRG)

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Valcárcel Juárez, Juan
Research Professor at
Centre de Regulació Genòmica (CRG)
Life & Medical Sciences
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Research interests

The genome provides the instructions to build and maintain the function of a living organism. Strangely, in complex organisms these instructions are not written as continuous messages, but rather as smaller pieces interrupted by meaningless text. This arrangement has the advantage that the pieces can be combined in different ways to generate alternative instructions. We study the molecular machinery that puts messages together and how the production of alternative messages is regulated.

Key words
RNA processing, gene regulation

ORCID
: 0000-0001-5398-3571

RESEARCHER ID
: O-9814-2014
Valencia Herrera, Alfonso

Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS)

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Valencia Herrera, Alfonso
Research Professor at
Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS)
Life & Medical Sciences
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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).

Key words
Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Precision Medicine, Genomics, Text Mining, Cognitive Computing

ORCID
: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8937-6789

RESEARCHER ID
: I-3127-2015