Ubi materia ibi geometria

My research interests and past experience cover diverse areas of biological and physical phenomena, ranging from network inference for genomics and neuroscience, modeling regulatory networks in the context medical applications, quorum sensing in bacteria, simulations of neuronal activity, to phase transitions, crystallisation and gravitational deflection of light.

  • Causal Inference and Omics: My research with Tom Michoel in the Computational Biology Unit focused on causal inference methods and their applications on genomic and multi-omic data. I am developing methods to distinguish correlation from causation given genomic population data. My goal is to participate in improving our understanding of complex gene regulatory networks (GRN) involving thousands of genes and their products in order to establish their phenotypic trait outcomes. This work has implications on the study of diseases and healthy phenotypes and finding therapeutic targets. See for example the github repository and reference [1].

  • Simulating Regulatory Networks: I have worked with models of gene regulatory networks. I have also worked with integrate and fire models of neuronal dynamics and the processes generating connections between neurons [2]. Before that, I have studied models and simulated the stochastic kinetics of a bistable chemical network controlling the collective behaviour (quorum sensing) of bacteria.

  • Inference of Neuronal Connectivity: In my previous research with Jordi Soriano at the University of Barcelona, Spain, I have worked with inference methods based on information theory to study functional connectivity of living neuronal networks. I used transfer entropy (TE) to infer the connections formed between individual neurons in 2D and 3D in vitro cultures. I worked in closely with colleagues at the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) near Barcelona on the calcium fluorescence imaging of the samples using light sheet imaging for 3D samples. Our goal being to contribute to a better understanding of the computational capabilities of nervous systems, I have also worked with integrate and fire models of neuronal dynamics and the processes generating connections between neurons. See reference [2].

For references refer to the Publications page.