I am a Computational Biologist and Bioinformatician with additional background in Neural Computation/Artificial Neural Networks and Computational Physics.

My research focuses on genome and proteome evolution. Over the past few years, we have made progress to quantitatively understand how the genetic architecture of life was transformed during eukaryogenesis. We have brought to light how the distributions of protein coding gene and protein lengths evolved across the whole tree of life. Our findings show, quantitatively, that eukaryotes emerged as a second-order transition phase, arising from the tension of increasing gene length and the constraints on producing longer proteins on average. Evolutionary biologists have tried to unveil the mechanism leading to eukaryotes after the symbiosis between a Bacteria and an Archaea, referred as the "black hole at the heart of biology". We have demostrated that it occurred abruptly but yet continuously, at a critical point. The increase in cellular complexity induced by this evolutionary event unlocked the path towards subsequent biological transitions such as multicellularity, sexuality, sociability, and so on.
In recent years, research on pseudogene evolution, retrotransposons, and the 3D architecture of chromatin and transcription has been also carried out.
Always a passionate of interdisciplinary teams.

Positions held

Since 2014 
Principal investigator (tenured), Johannes Gutenberg University (JGU), Mainz, Germany

2007-2014 
Research associate, Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, Berlin, Germany

2003-2007 
Postdoctoral researcher at the Molecular Medicine department, Ottawa Health Research Institute, Ottawa, Canada

2000-2003 
Software engineer (Artificial Intelligence, Data Mining, Web), Madrid, Spain

1999-2000 
Predoctoral researcher at CAB (NASA Astrobiology Institute), INTA-CSIC, Madrid, Spain

1998 
Visiting Predoctoral researcher (Summer), Computer Science department, University of Texas, Austin, USA

1997 
Visiting Predoctoral researcher (Summer), Institut für Neuroinformatik. Ruhr Universität, Bochum, Germany

1996 
Visiting Predoctoral researcher (Summer), Laboratorio de Computaçaõ, Electrical Engineering, Universidade Federal de Goias, Goiania, Brazil

1995-1999 
Predoctoral researcher at the Computer Science department, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain

Education

2000   
PhD in Computational Physics, Faculty of Physics, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain

1994 
BSc and MSc in Physics, Faculty of Physics, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain