Alcobendas, Community of Madrid, Spain
Currently, I am a technical consultant within the professional services team at SciBite-Elsevier. In my role, I support customers throughout their data journeys and the implementation of our data and technology, from scoping to training, including coding and customizing solutions tailored to their specific needs. I collaborate with internal stakeholders, ranging from project management and sales to data scientists and developers, to enhance our products, create new ones, and excel in delivering exceptional customer experiences. Previously, I worked as a structural biology scientist and earned a PhD in Biotechnology, with a keen interest in programming and science communication. Prior to transitioning to the industry, I accumulated over 8 years of experience developing software methods to address structural biology challenges and sharing these advancements through international conferences and workshops. I thrive on collaborating with diverse teams and engaging in interdisciplinary discussions. I am passionate about communicating not only about science and research but also about various topics that I find intriguing and motivating. I take pride in creating tools that have a positive impact on the research conducted by both public and private organizations.
SciBite’s data-first, semantic analytics software is for those who want to innovate and get more from their data. Built by scientists for scientists, SciBite believes data fuels discovery and is leading the way with its pioneering infrastructure that combines the latest in machine learning with an ontology-led approach to unlock the value of scientific content. With headquarters in the UK, SciBite supports its global customer base with additional sites in the US and Japan.
I worked as a research associate at the group of Professor Randy Read FRS. His laboratory has contributed very significantly to developing probabilistic approaches to structural biology. Our software, Phaser (a key part of two major international collaborations: Phenix and CCP4), is one of the most widely applied resources in macromolecular crystallography, used to solve many thousands of structures. The group’s current research interest is broad and involves applying their expertise to the CryoEM field as well as other aspects of structural biology. My particular focus is on the continuation of the development of phaser_voyager, a structural biology computing framework that focus on modularity and abstraction and enables rapid implementation of specific strategies, tracking of pathways and result analysis. I have developed and published a strategy to compute scores for predicted models and evaluate their potential as molecular replacement models, and I am currently developing other strategies, as well as maintaining the existing ones.
My PhD scholarship provided 1-year funding for postdoctoral research in the same group. During this period, I was invited to speak about my work at the 2019 CCP4 Study Weekend, a major venue for presenting new methods in protein crystallography. The associated first-author publication described new algorithms in ALIXE that answered many questions left open by my thesis work. Also, with the aim of broadening my expertise and build a bridge to electron microscopy, part of my extended post-doc was spent working with Prof. Carazo’s group in the National Center for Biotechnology (CNB), where I learned how to acquire and process cryoEM data. I also keep a collaboration with the group of Prof. Rodríguez at UCLA, a pioneer in the micro-electron diffraction (MicroED) field. We have recently published a first approach to using fragment-based methods for MicroED structure solution and have another draft in preparation. Scientific communications/activities during this postdoctoral experience: (Vienna, 08/2019) Attendance of the 32nd European Crystallographic Meeting and selected talk “Using ARCIMBOLDO’s fragment-based phasing for solving microED data from macromolecular structures”. Also judge of the Protein Data Bank poster prize and coauthor in a poster presentation. (Erice, 05/2019) Attendance of the 2019 International School of Crystallography “Cryo 3D” (Nottingham, 01/2019) Invited lecture at the CCP4 2019 Study weekend - "Integrated, rational MR”, entitled “ALIXE and SHREDDER: Combining phase information from homologs”. (Oxfordshire, 08/2018) Invited lecture at the BCA-CCP4 summer school, in Diamond Light Source, entitled “An introduction to Molecular Replacement” (Konstanz, 12/2018) Invited lecture at Konstanz University, entitled “ARCIMBOLDO: phasing with fragments combining MR (PHASER) and density modification (SHELXE)”
First researcher associated to the project and afterwards PhD student position in the Crystallographic Methods group of the Department of Structural Biology, Molecular Biology Institute of Barcelona – Spanish Research Council (IBMB-CSIC). Supervised by Dr. Isabel Usón, developing methods within the ARCIMBOLDO software scope, employed on the phasing of protein structures of environmental and biomedical interest. In particular, my thesis concluded with the development of two new pieces of software, ARCIMBOLDO_SHREDER spheres and ALIXE, that have pushed the boundaries of fragment-based molecular replacement phasing.
Research stage at the group of Prof. Randy Read (http://www.cimr.cam.ac.uk/research/principal-investigators/principal-investigators-q-z/read), developers of the molecular replacement software Phaser. Working on different projects, including the integration of the ARCIMBOLDO programs into the CCP4 Software suite (http://www.ccp4.ac.uk/).
I prepared and gave structural biology tutorials for three different practical sessions of the Bioinformatics course.
I prepared a talk and a tutorial, called "Structural Biology of Human Full-length Nuclear Receptors: A Practical tutorial on Pymol and Molecular Visualization". The session was part of the course "Design and Evaluation of Bioactive Molecules"