Concepción Arenas

Associate Professor

Department of Genetics, Microbiology and Statistics: Section of Statistics

(University of Barcelona)

Biosketch

I graduated in Mathematics at the Universitat de Barcelona (UB) in 1982. My scientific career started in the Statistics Department of the Universitat de Barcelona (UB) as Assistant Professor of Statistics. In 1987, I obtained my PhD in Mathematics, specialty in Statistics (Universitat de Barcelona). I am Associate Professor of Statistics (Statistics Section of the Genetics, Microbiology and Statistics Department, Universitat of Barcelona) since 1990.

My research interests are the development of new statistical methodologies for the application in biomedicine, evolutionary genetics, bioinformatics and robotics.

I was founder member of the Multivariate Analysis and Classification group. This group belongs to the International Federation of Classification Societies (IFCS).

I was founder member of the Teaching and Learning of Statistics and Operations Research group.

I was member of the Faculty Commission for the Departmental Reorganization (Faculty of Biology, Universitat de Barcelona).

I am member of the Student Council of the Biomedical Sciences degree (Universitat de Barcelona).

Research areas:

1) Statistical methodology

Our research focuses on the development of new statistical methods that could be useful in different research areas as biomedicine; ecology; evolutionary genetics or bioinformatics, specifically DNA sequence analysis and microarray interpretation.

2) Evolutionary study of Drosophila subobscura and global warming

Our research focuses on the development and application of many statistical procedures to study the variations of inversion chromosomal polymorphism of Drosophila subobscura in relation with global warming.

3) Genetic predisposition to psychiatric disorders: drug addictions and ADHD

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), substance abuse and autism are neuropsychiatric disorders in which genetic factors play an important role.

Our research focuses on the construction of new multivariate statistical methods to identify genes involved in the development of ADH, dependence to cocaine or to other drugs and autism spectrum disorders.

4) Soft Biometry People Analysis for Multilingual Assistance Services based on Multisensor Perception and Mobile Robotics

An important area of artificial intelligence and robotics is to develop techniques and tools that improve the management of a public building.

Our research focuses on the development of new statistical techniques in areas as gender classification, age estimation or clothing description. The introduction of the mobile robot as part of the camera network implies to solve temporal and spatial coherence problems between the information supplied by the robot and those supplied by the camera network.

Publication links: ORCID, ResearchGate, ResearcherID, LINKEDIN, SCOPUS, GScholar

Education

Ph.D. in Mathematics, Barcelona University, October 1987
BSc (Llicenciatura) in Mathematics, Barcelona University, June 1982

Teaching

Mathematics; Statistics; Experimental Design and Data Analysis in the Biology, Biochemistry, Biotechnology and Biomedical Sciences degrees (University of Barcelona)

Multivariate Data Analysis in the master's degree "Ecology, Management and Restoration of Natural Environment" and in the master's degree "Biomedicine".

Supervision of PhD students (since 2007)

Itziar Irigoien (2008). Associate Professor at the Department of Computation Science and Artificial Intelligence University of the Basque Country, Donostia, Spain.