His appointment confirms the centre’s commitment to personalized medicine as an area of future development for supercomputing.
The Biologist Alfonso Valencia has been appointed at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) as Director of the Life Sciences Department, with the support of the ICREA program.
Alfonso Valencia is Director of the National Institute of Bioinformatics (Salud Carlos III Institute platform (INB-ISCIII) and node of ELIXIR the European Infrastructure of Bioinformatics), Founder and President of the International Society for Computational Biology and Co-Executive Director of the main journal in the field (Bioinformatics of Oxford University Press).
The incorporation of Valencia to BSC-CNS confirms the centre’s commitment to personalized medicine as an area of future development for supercomputing. In the opinion of the new head of the Life Sciences Department, “the BSC offers a privileged environment to create an analysis platform of genomes of biomedical interest, capable of coordinating the efforts of internal and external BSC groups, making it competitive at an international level. Facing the enormous biomedical challenges of the future will only be possible with the coordination of the incredible scientific and technical resources of the BSC, in the rich scientific environment of Barcelona, and in combination with both National (INB-ISCIII) and European scientific infrastructures (ELIXIR)”.
Alfonso Valencia´s research is centred in the area of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. The computational methods for the genome analysis are particularly application to Precision Medicine. He has also worked in the development of computational methods for the prediction of protein structures and functions, the analysis biological networks and for modelling of molecular systems. These methods are based in the development of open and collaborative structures and are immersed in large international collaborative projects.
Alfonso Valencia is also a Member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, EBI chemical and protein domain databases, IRB, UPF_DCEX, Greek ELIXIR-Node, amongst others; Associate Editor of eLIFE, PeerJ, FEBS Letters, and co-leader of the new journal f1000 “Bioinformatics, Biomedical Informatics & Computational Biology”. In addition to being a member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) and Founder of the BioCreative challenge in text mining.
During the last ten years, Valencia has performed his research in the National Oncology Research Center, CNIO, where he was also the Vice-Director of Basic Research and Director of the Structural Biology and BioComputing Program.
