Saez-Rodriguez Group

Systems Biomedicine

Pau Badia i Mompel

Thanks to a wonderful high school teacher, I have been interested in Biology since I was a teenager. Following this enthusiasm, in 2014 I decided to pursue a Bachelor’s degree in Biology. Because I have always been a computer nerd, I was delighted when I “discovered” the field of Bioinformatics. It motivated me to start programming on my own, implementing algorithms from scratch or toying with data visualization methods. After my Bachelor’s internship in a Computational Biology group, I enrolled in a two years Master in Bioinformatics for Health Sciences. For my Master’s internship, I had the pleasure to work in Patrick Aloy’s group developing the Chemical Checker, a chemoinformatics resource of bioactivity signatures for small molecules. Specifically, my Master’s thesis focused on the inference of bioactivity signatures for uncharacterized compounds and the automated generation of novel molecules optimized by a target bioactivity signature. This project allowed me to learn about the state of the art in deep learning algorithms and spurred me to learn more about the modeling of biological data. In September 2020 I started pursuing my PhD here in the Saez group.

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Research Interests

Coming from a deep learning background, I am keen to implement mechanism  based models, which do not behave like a “black box”, allowing to infer clear biological insights. I am also interested in the combination of multiple high-throughput omics data, specifically with single cell resolution, to understand the underlying mechanisms of a wide variety of diseases.

Professional Career

2020 - Present: PhD Candidate, Institute for Computational Biomedicine, Heidelberg University, Faculty of Medicine & Heidelberg University Hospital, Germany.
2019 - 2020: Master student at the Structural Bioinformatics and Network Biology group in Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB), led by Patrick Aloy.
2017: Summer Internship at the Computational Biology group in Institut de Biotecnologia i Biomedicina (IBB), led by Xavier Daura.

Education

2020 - Present: PhD Candidate, Institute for Computational Biomedicine, Heidelberg University, Faculty of Medicine & Heidelberg University Hospital, Germany.
2018 - 2020: MSc in Bioinformatics for Health Sciences, Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), Catalonia, Spain.
2014 - 2018: BSc in Biology, Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), Catalonia, Spain.