Alfonso Valencia

Alfonso Valencia
Alfonso Valencia speaking at ISMB/ECCB 2013.
Fields	Computational biology Bioinformatics Cancer genomics Text mining Protein evolution[1]
Institutions	Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute Spanish National Center for Biotechnology (CNB) European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) Spanish National Cancer Research Centre
Alma mater	Complutense University of Madrid Autonomous University of Madrid (PhD)
Academic advisors	Chris Sander[2][3][4]
Known for	BioCreative[5][6][7][8]
Notable awards	EMBO member ISCB Fellow (2010)

Alfonso Valencia is a Spanish biologist, the current director of the Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute and the Structural and Computational Biology Group leader at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO).^[9] As of 2014, he is also President-elect of the International Society for Computational Biology. His research is focused on the study of protein families and their interaction networks.^[1][10][11]

Education

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.^[10] 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][13]

Research

In 1994 Valencia formed the Protein Design Group at the Spanish National Center for Biotechnology (CNB).^[10] He is currently leader of the Structural and Computational Biology Group at CNIO. The research focus of this group is mainly on the understanding of how cancer progresses, using a combination of molecular and evolutionary approaches. The main research goals are to analyse the function and interactions of cancer-related proteins and to develop novel computational methods to analyse, represent and interpret cancer genome information.^[14]

As of 2015, Valencia has published over 300 peer reviewed papers,^[1][15][16] which have been cited more than 12,000 times,^[11] in scientific journals including Nature,^[17][18][19] PNAS,^[2] Nucleic Acids Research,^[20][21] the Journal of Molecular Biology,^[22][23][24] Bioinformatics,^{[25][26][27][28]} Genome Biology,^{[6][7][29][30]} PLOS Computational Biology,^[31] PLOS Biology,^[32] Nature Genetics,^[33][34] Nature Biotechnology,^[8][35] Genome Research,^[36] Biochemistry,^[3] Current Opinion in Structural Biology,^[37] Nature Structural Biology,^[4] Trends in Genetics^[38] and the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology conference.^[39]

Awards and Honours

Valencia was appointed Research Professor at the CNB in 2005.^[10] He was a founding member of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) and was honoured as an ISCB Fellow in 2010.^[40] Valencia has also served as ISCB Vice President and in 2013 was appointed President-elect; in 2015, he will replace Burkhard Rost as ISCB President.^[11] He is also an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO).^[41]

Valencia participates in several international consortia, such as ENCODE,^[17][32][36] the International Cancer Genome Consortium, the International Rare Diseases Research Consortium (IRDiRC), the International Human Epigenomics Consortium^[35] and the European Life-sciences Infrastructure for Biological Information (ELIXIR).^[11]

He is currently co-executive editor of the journal Bioinformatics and serves on the editorial board of The EMBO Journal and EMBO reports.^[10]

References