Alfonso Valencia facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Alfonso Valencia
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Alfonso Valencia speaking at ISMB/ECCB 2013.
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| Known for | BioCreative |
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| Academic advisors | Chris Sander |
Alfonso Valencia is a Spanish scientist who works with computers to understand living things. He is a professor at ICREA and leads the Life Sciences department at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. He also directs the Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute (INB-ISCIII). From 2015 to 2018, he was the president of the International Society for Computational Biology.
His work focuses on using computers to solve problems in biology and medicine. He has created new ways to find information in scientific texts, study how proteins change over time, and understand how diseases are connected. He also helps with big international projects that study cancer. Alfonso Valencia is a key person in setting up important science networks in Spain and around the world. He is also an editor for Bioinformatics, a major science journal.
Education and Early Discoveries
Alfonso Valencia studied biology at the Complutense University of Madrid. He learned about how populations change over time and how living things work at a basic level. In 1987, he visited the American Red Cross Laboratory to do research. He earned his PhD in molecular biology in 1988 from the Autonomous University of Madrid.
From 1989 to 1994, he worked at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Germany. There, he studied how proteins change and develop. He looked at their genetic codes and their shapes.
In 1994, Alfonso Valencia was a main author on an important paper. This paper showed that if two parts of a protein change together across different species, they might be close to each other in the protein's final shape. This idea helped scientists guess the shapes of proteins better. Later, this method became very important for programs like DeepMind's AlphaFold 2, which can predict protein shapes very accurately.
Research Work
In 1994, Valencia started the Protein Design Group at the Spanish National Center for Biotechnology (CNB). He later led the Structural and Computational Biology Group at CNIO. In 2006, he became the director of the Structural Biology and Biocomputing program at the Spanish National Cancer Research Center (CNIO).
Since 2016, he has been a professor at ICREA. He also leads the Life Sciences Department at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC).
As a computational biologist, his main goal is to understand how biological systems work. This includes studying diseases like cancer. He uses a mix of bioinformatics, network biology, and machine learning (which is like teaching computers to learn). His team has created tools to:
- Predict protein structures.
- Understand how proteins interact with each other.
- Study biological networks.
- Find information in texts and data.
His work helps in areas like epigenetics (how genes are turned on or off), cancer genomics (studying cancer genes), and understanding why people might have more than one disease at once. All these efforts help with personalised medicine. This means creating treatments that are just right for each person. He is especially interested in how artificial intelligence and supercomputers can help with this.
As of 2024, Valencia has written over 450 scientific papers. These papers have been used by other scientists more than 92,000 times. His work has appeared in top science journals like Nature and PNAS.
Awards and Honours
Alfonso Valencia has received many awards and honours for his work. In 2024, he became a member of the Academy of Medicine of Zaragoza, Spain. He was also named a Research Professor at the CNB in 2005.
He helped start the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). In 2010, he was named an ISCB Fellow, which is a special honour. He also served as Vice President of ISCB and was elected President in 2013. From 2015 to 2018, he was the President of the ISCB. He has also received an honorary doctorate from the Danish DTU. He is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO).
Valencia is part of several big international science groups. These include Genecode / ENCODE, the International Cancer Genome Consortium, and the International Rare Diseases Research Consortium (IRDiRC). He also leads the Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute. This institute is part of ELIXIR, a European project that helps share biological information.
He is currently a co-executive editor for the journal Bioinformatics. He also serves on the editorial boards of other important science journals.
See also
In Spanish: Alfonso Valencia para niños
