Alfonso Valencia
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Alfonso Valencia | |
|---|---|
 Alfonso Valencia speaking at ISMB/ECCB 2013. | |
| Alma mater | |
| Known for | BioCreative[1][2][3][4] |
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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]
