Evolutionary Processes Modeling
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Donate Weghorn (Principal investigator)Donate [doˈnɑːtə] did her PhD at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Cologne, Germany. After that she moved to the Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA, for her postdoc years. She started her group at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in October 2018. |
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Miguel Cortés Guzmán (PhD student)Miguel obtained his Bachelor's degree in Biosciences (2018) and a Master's degree in Computer Science (2020) from the Technological Institute of Monterrey in Mexico. His Master thesis work focused on the comparison of gene co-expression metrics, pipelines, and analysis of gene networks. He joined the lab in 2021 as a PhD student with interests in tumor evolutionary dynamics and tissue-specific cancer genes. |
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Nica Gutu (Postdoc)Nica completed her bachelor's degree in Physics (2019) at Universitat de Barcelona, Spain, and master's degree in Engineering Physics (2020) at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain. Next, she obtained her doctoral degree in Biophysics (2024) at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Germany. She focused on the chronobiological regulation of cellular proliferation and drug responses in tumor cells. Using mathematical modeling and experimental methodologies, she explored the role of the circadian clock and p53-p21 dynamics in cellular growth. In January 2025, she started her postdoctoral research within the group, investigating how the heterogeneity of mutation rates, under the influence of selection processes, shape tumor evolution. |
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Maria Kelly (PhD student)Maria completed her undergraduate and master's degrees in Mathematics at Oxford University. She specialized in the mathematical modeling of biological systems, from neuron firing to genetics. Her Master's thesis focused on computational models of the delta-notch signaling pathway. She joined the lab as a PhD student in October 2024 and will be working on modeling evolution and cancer. |
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Javier Ordoñez Araujo (PhD student)Javier completed a Bachelor's degree in Physics and a Master's degree in Astronomy (2024) at the National University of Colombia, focusing on data analysis of cold solar observations in the chromosphere. His work in the group centers on analyzing cancer evolution through simulations and data analysis, exploring tumor-immune system interactions. |
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Michel Owusu (Affiliated postdoc)Michel did his PhD at CeMM, the Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, in Vienna, where he worked on genomic instability in cancer and rare diseases. Michel joined the group in October 2019 as an Erwin Schrödinger fellow (FWF) and is now doing his fellowship return phase in Vienna. Michel is interested in the links between DNA damage/repair, mutations and selection in the evolution of malignant cells. |
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Roger Parramon Codina (Research assistant)Roger obtained his Bachelor's degree in Genetics (2022) and his Master's degree in Bioinformatics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. His Master's thesis was about cancer evolution and tumour drivers. Roger joined the group in 2023 as an intern for his Master's degree and continued as a research trainee. He is interested in population genomics, evolution, and cancer research. |
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Raúl Sanz (Research assistant)Raúl obtained his Bachelor's degree in Bioinformatics at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona (2022) and is currently enrolled in the Master's degree in Biomedical Data Science at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili. He is interested in applying machine learning techniques to large-scale data to solve biomedical problems. |