Alfonso Valencia | |
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Alma mater | |
Known for | BioCreative [1] [2] [3] [4] |
Awards |
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Scientific career | |
Fields | |
Institutions | |
Academic advisors | Chris Sander [6] [7] [8] |
Alfonso Valencia is a Spanish biologist, ICREA Professor, current director of the Life Sciences department at Barcelona Supercomputing Center, [9] of Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute (INB-ISCIII), and coordinator of the data pillar of the Spanish Personalised Medicine initiative, IMPaCT. From 2015 to 2018, he was President of the International Society for Computational Biology. [10]
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 the ELIXIR infrastructure, founder of the Spanish and International Bioinformatics networks and former president of ISCB, the international professional association of Bioinformaticians. He is Executive Editor of the main journal in the field (Bioinformatics OUP).
His research is focused on the study of biomedical systems with computational biology and bioinformatics approaches. [5]
Valencia studied biology at the Complutense University of Madrid, training in population genetics and biophysics. [11] In 1987 he was a visiting scientist at the American Red Cross Laboratory. [12] He received his PhD in molecular biology in 1988 from the Autonomous University of Madrid. [13] From 1989 to 1994 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Chris Sander at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, studying the evolution of protein function using sequence- and structure-based approaches. [12] [14]
The 1994 paper "Correlated mutations and residue contacts in proteins", [15] of which Valencia was senior author, established the idea that correlated mutations at corresponding locations in the DNA sequences in different organisms could indicate that those locations corresponded to amino-acid residues that were physically close to each other in the final protein, informing the prediction of contact maps. This previously unconsidered source of side information for protein structure prediction became used with increasing effectiveness in the 2010s, leading ultimately to the success of DeepMind's AlphaFold 2 algorithm in 2020. [16]
In 1994 Valencia formed the Protein Design Group at the Spanish National Center for Biotechnology (CNB). [13] He was leader of the Structural and Computational Biology Group at CNIO. [13] In 2006 he moved to the Spanish National Cancer Research Center (CNIO) as Director of the Structural Biology and Biocomputing programme.
Since 2016 he is ICREA Professor [17] and Director of the Life Sciences Department of the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC). [18] [19]
As computational biologist, the focus of his work is the mechanistic understanding of biological systems, including cancer and other diseases, with a combination of Bioinformatics, Network Biology and Machine Learning approaches. His group has developed systems in the areas of protein structure prediction, protein interactions and protein networks, systems biology, text and data mining, with applications in epigenetic, cancer genomics [20] and disease comorbidity. All these actives converge into the general topic of Personalised Medicine, with particular interest in the interface with Artificial intelligence and High Performance Computing.
As of 2024 [update] , Valencia has published over 450 peer reviewed papers, [5] [21] [22] which have been cited more than 92.000 times, [11] in scientific journals including Nature , [23] [24] [25] PNAS , [6] Nucleic Acids Research , [26] [27] the Journal of Molecular Biology , [28] [29] [30] Bioinformatics , [31] [32] [33] [34] Genome Biology , [2] [3] [35] [36] PLOS Computational Biology , [37] PLOS Biology , [38] Nature Genetics , [39] [40] Nature Biotechnology , [4] [41] Genome Research , [42] Biochemistry , [7] Current Opinion in Structural Biology , [43] Nature Structural Biology , [8] Trends in Genetics [44] and the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology conference. [45]
Valencia has been nominated Corresponding Member of the Academy of Medicine of Zaragoza, Spain, in 2024. He was also appointed Research Professor at the CNB in 2005. [13] He was a founding member of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) and was honoured as an ISCB Fellow in 2010. [46] Valencia has also served as ISCB Vice President and in 2013 was appointed President-elect. [11] From 2015 to 2018, he was President of the ISCB, succeeding Burkhard Rost. Valencia is Doctor Honoris cause of the Danish DTU and elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). [47]
Valencia participates in several international consortia, such as Genecode / ENCODE, [23] [38] [42] the International Cancer Genome Consortium, the International Rare Diseases Research Consortium (IRDiRC), the International Human Epigenomics Consortium. [41] Valencia is Director of the Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute a platform of the ISCIII, the Spanish node of the European Life-sciences Infrastructure for Biological Information (ELIXIR). [11]
He is currently co-executive editor of the journal Bioinformatics , and member of the Editorial boards of eLIFE, FEBS Letters, PeerJ and F1000 Prime.
John Frederick William Birney is joint director of EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire and deputy director general of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). He also serves as non-executive director of Genomics England, chair of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) and honorary professor of bioinformatics at the University of Cambridge. Birney has made significant contributions to genomics, through his development of innovative bioinformatics and computational biology tools. He previously served as an associate faculty member at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.
Mark Bender Gerstein is an American scientist working in bioinformatics and Data Science. As of 2009, he is co-director of the Yale Computational Biology and Bioinformatics program.
David Haussler is an American bioinformatician known for his work leading the team that assembled the first human genome sequence in the race to complete the Human Genome Project and subsequently for comparative genome analysis that deepens understanding the molecular function and evolution of the genome.
Webb Colby Miller is an American bioinformatician who is professor in the Department of Biology and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University.
Temple Ferris Smith is an emeritus professor in biomedical engineering who helped to develop the Smith-Waterman algorithm with Michael Waterman in 1981. The Smith-Waterman algorithm serves as the basis for multi sequence comparisons, identifying the segment with the maximum local sequence similarity, see sequence alignment. This algorithm is used for identifying similar DNA, RNA and protein segments. He was director of the BioMolecular Engineering Research Center at Boston University for twenty years and is now professor emeritus.
Dame Janet Maureen Thornton, is a senior scientist and director emeritus at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). She is one of the world's leading researchers in structural bioinformatics, using computational methods to understand protein structure and function. She served as director of the EBI from October 2001 to June 2015, and played a key role in ELIXIR.
Sean Roberts Eddy is Professor of Molecular & Cellular Biology and of Applied Mathematics at Harvard University. Previously he was based at the Janelia Research Campus from 2006 to 2015 in Virginia. His research interests are in bioinformatics, computational biology and biological sequence analysis. As of 2016 projects include the use of Hidden Markov models in HMMER, Infernal Pfam and Rfam.
Cyrus Homi Chothia was an English biochemist who was an emeritus scientist at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) at the University of Cambridge and emeritus fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge.
The European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB) is a scientific meeting on the subjects of bioinformatics and computational biology. It covers a wide spectrum of disciplines, including bioinformatics, computational biology, genomics, computational structural biology, and systems biology. ECCB is organized annually in different European cities. Since 2007, the conference has been held jointly with Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) every second year. The conference also hosts the European ISCB Student Council Symposium. The proceedings of the conference are published by the journal Bioinformatics.
Chris Sander is a computational biologist based at the Dana-Farber Cancer Center and Harvard Medical School. Previously he was chair of the Computational Biology Programme at the Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. In 2015, he moved his lab to the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute and the Cell Biology Department at Harvard Medical School.
Burkhard Rost is a scientist leading the Department for Computational Biology & Bioinformatics at the Faculty of Informatics of the Technical University of Munich (TUM). Rost chairs the Study Section Bioinformatics Munich involving the TUM and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) in Munich. From 2007-2014 Rost was President of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB).
Dana Pe'er, Chair and Professor in Computational and Systems Biology Program at Sloan Kettering Institute is a researcher in computational systems biology. A Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator since 2021, she was previously a professor at Columbia Department of Biological Sciences. Pe'er's research focuses on understanding the organization, function and evolution of molecular networks, particularly how genetic variations alter the regulatory network and how these genetic variations can cause cancer.
Timothy John Phillip Hubbard is a Professor of Bioinformatics at King's College London, Head of Genome Analysis at Genomics England and Honorary Faculty at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK. From 1 March 2024, Hubbard became the director of Europe's Life Science Data Infrastructure ELIXIR.
Mathieu Daniel Blanchette is a computational biologist and Director of the School of Computer Science at McGill University. His research focuses on developing new algorithms for the detection of functional regions in DNA sequences.
Alexander George Bateman is a computational biologist and Head of Protein Sequence Resources at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Cambridge, UK. He has led the development of the Pfam biological database and introduced the Rfam database of RNA families. He has also been involved in the use of Wikipedia for community-based annotation of biological databases.
Curtis Huttenhower is a Professor of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics in the Department of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Harvard University.
Sarah Amalia Teichmann is a German scientist, the former head of cellular genetics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and a visiting research group leader at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). She serves as director of research in the Cavendish Laboratory, Professor at the University of Cambridge and Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, and is a senior research fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge.
Christine Anne Orengo is a Professor of Bioinformatics at University College London (UCL) known for her work on protein structure, particularly the CATH database. Orengo serves as president of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), the first woman to do so in the history of the society.
Janet Kelso is a South African computational biologist and Group leader of the Minerva Research Group for Bioinformatics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. She is best known for her work comparing DNA from previous humans with those of the present.
Christos A. Ouzounis is a computational biologist, a director of research at the CERTH, and Professor of Bioinformatics at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki.