Mª Luz Calle Rosingana

Title: TBA

Biosketch

Mª Luz Calle is Full Professor of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics and Dean of the Faculty of Sciences, Technology and Engineering, University of Vic – Central University of Catalonia. With a background in Mathematics (BSc Mathematics, Universitat de Barcelona, 1986 and PhD in Mathematics, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, 1997), she teaches biostatistics and bioinformatics in the Biotechnology degree and Statistical and data-mining methods for omics data analysis in the Master of Sciences in Omics Data Analysis. She is the group leader of the Bi-squared group (Bionformatics and Bioimaging) of the University of Vic (consolidated group 2021SGR-01249). Her main research areas are statistical genetics, omics data analysis, microbiome data analysis and survival analysis. She works on the development of new methods for biomarker discovery, identification of genetic risk profiles and construction of dynamic prediction and prognostic models of disease evolution. She is also interested in statistical methods for integration of multi-omics data and compositional data approaches in metagenomics.

She is member of several scientific societies: BiostatNet-Spanish National Network in Biostatistics, Catalan Statistical Society, Spanish Society of Statistics and Operational Research, International Biometric Society, International Genetic Epidemiology Society. Former Head of the Biosciences Department (2018-2022), chair of the Master of Sciences in Omics Data Analysis (2012-2020), President and Vicepresident of the Spanish Region of the International Biometrics Society (2012-2013 and 2014, respectively).

Roderic Guigó Serra

Title: TBA

Biosketch

Professor Roderic Guigó has close to 40 years of experience in research in computational biology. Since 2005 he chairs the Computational Biology of RNA Processing group at the Centre for Genomic Regulation. He is Bioinformatics professor at University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.

His broad scientific interest is in the understanding of the encoding of functional information in biological sequences. He has participated in many international genomics and functional genomics projects, including the human, the mouse, ENCODE, GTEx, ICGC, FANTOM, Blueprint, and others. He initiated GENCODE, the international effort to establish the reference gene and transcript annotation for the human and mouse genome, and he is still part of the consortium. He is currently participating in several projects funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the European Commission and the Spanish and Catalan governments.

He is part of large-scale genomics leadership for the GA4GH, and co-chair of the ethics committee for the Human Cell Atlas. He promoted and helped to launch the Catalan Initiative for the Earth BioGenome Project, and he is a member of its steering committee.

Geert Molenberghs

The applied statistical (data) scientist in a high-profile and societal environment: Past, present, and future

Biosketch

Geert Molenberghs is Professor of Biostatistics at UHasselt and KU Leuven. He received a degree in mathematics (1988) and a Ph.D. in biostatistics (1993) from UAntwerpen.

He published on surrogate markers in clinical trials, and categorical, longitudinal, and missing data. He was Editor for Applied Statistics, Biometrics, and Biostatistics, and is currently Executive Editor of Biometrics. He was President of the International Biometric Society. He is Fellow of the American Statistical Association, received the Guy Medal in Bronze from the Royal Statistical Society, and held visiting positions at Harvard. He is founding director of the Center for Statistics at UHasselt and of the Interuniversity Institute for Biostatistics and statistical Bioinformatics (UHasselt and KU Leuven).

He received research funding from FWO, IWT, the EU (FP7), U.S. NIH, U.S. NSF, UHasselt, KU Leuven, ECDC, and EMA. He is member of the Belgian Royal Academy of Medicine. He has been active (as advisor, researcher, and communicator) in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic response. He has taken part in various grant funded research programs on rare diseases, including IDEAL, EJP RD, ERDERA (future), and RealiseD (future).

Carmen Armero Cervera

Title: TBA

Biosketch

Carmen Armero is Full Professor of Statistics and Operations Research in the Universitat de València and Biomathematics and Statistic Scotland (BioSS) Associate. She is also the Director of the Bayesian València Research Group, the past Chair of the València International Bayesian Analysis Summer School, and the vice-president of Statistics of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research (SEIO). Her research has always been carried out in the framework of Bayesian Inference, first in queueing systems and later in survival analysis and longitudinal models. She is currently the PI of the Universitat de València in a European project on Bayesian networks in semi-autonomous driving of vehicles. She has published methodological and applied papers in high impact scientific journals, such as Statistics in Medicine, Statistical Methods in Medical Research, The American Statistician, Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment, Queueing Systems, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series D, or Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics (See CV_publications for a list of her publications). She has made research visits to the University of Cambridge (UK), Lancaster University (UK), Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland (BioSS) and Stockholm Resilience Centre (Sweden)

Martí Casals Toquero

Title: TBA

Biosketch

Martí Casals holds a PhD in Statistics from the University of Barcelona (UB). Currently, he is an associate professor of statistics at the Faculty of Medicine of the UVic-UCC and of Sport Analytics at the National Institute of Physical Education of Catalonia (INEFC-UB). Martí’s research lies in the fields of sports biostatistics, sports analytics, and statistical thinking. He has collaborated as a sports statistician at FC Barcelona and as an external biostatistician and Basketball Analyst at the Memphis Grizzlies.

Pol Castellano Escuder

Title: TBA

Biosketch

Pol is a Bioinformatician at Duke University, working at the intersection of computational biology and artificial intelligence to accelerate scientific discovery. His expertise includes developing autonomous AI agents and machine learning pipelines that expand the scope of traditional bioinformatics. By integrating multi-omics data with AI techniques like transformer models, neural networks, and other statistical frameworks, Pol’s work seeks to uncover complex biological patterns for a deeper understanding of molecular biology. Pol holds a Ph.D. in Biomedicine with a focus on Bioinformatics from the University of Barcelona and has participated in research projects at institutions in Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. His contributions have led to numerous publications in high-impact journals and fostered international collaborations, including joint projects with Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore.

David Conesa Guillén

Title: TBA

Biosketch

David Conesa holds a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Valencia, where he has been working since October 1993. He carries out research in the area of statistical modelling of situations in which uncertainty is present, mainly from a Bayesian perspective. Thus, for example, he has worked on problems of waiting time models, hierarchical models, efficiency analysis, animal survival models, and most recently on models of spatial distribution of species and diseases. He is co-author of more than 90 publications, most of them indexed in journals of international impact, and more than 250 communications in national and international congresses. He has co-directed 10 theses and is currently co-directing three more. He has done research and teaching stays at Duke University (USA), Lancaster University (UK), Statistical and Applied Mathematics Sciences Institute (USA), Université de Bordeaux (France), Università de Bergamo (Italy), Universidade do Minho (Portugal), Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Italy) and several Spanish universities. He was the President of the Spanish Society of Biostatistics during 2014 and 2015, and is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Statistics and Operations Research Transactions (SORT). He has taught Mathematics, Biostatistics, Experiment Design, Spatial and Temporal Statistics, Mathematical Statistics, Statistical Modelling, Probability and Simulation, Bayesian Statistics, Computation and Programming in R, Generalized Linear Models, and Smoothing, Additive and Mixed Models.

Xavier de la Cruz Montserrat

Breaking the Bottleneck in Genetic Variant Interpretation for Precision Medicine

Biosketch

His career revolves around the application of in silico tools to address biological questions. His Ph.D. focused on studying the protein structure principles underlying function, a topic he pursued during his stay at the NIH (1993-1997) and UCL (1997-2000). After joining ICREA, this topic became the main focus of his work (PCB, 2001-2009; IBMB-CSIC, 2009-2012). However, his interests have gradually shifted towards the study of translational problems in biomedicine. In this direction, in 2012, he joined the Vall d'Hebron Institute of Research (VHIR) to enhance the applicability of their work on the pathogenicity of genetic variants, bringing it closer to healthcare stakeholders. His efforts recently gained international recognition after his participation in the prestigious CAGI5/ENIGMA and CAGI6/ARSA contests, where his group ranked second in both competitions.

Ramón Díaz Uriarte

Title: TBA

Biosketch

Ramon is currently Professor ("Catedrático") at the Department of Biochemistry, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM). Before that, and for nine years, he was a researcher at the Spanish National Cancer Center (CNIO). His research (at UAM and CNIO) has been in bioinformatics, computational biology, and statistical computing (applied to bioinformatics problems).

His background is a mix of biology (BSc. in Biology ---from UAM---, PhD Zoology ---University of Wisconsin-Madison) and statistics (MSc. Biometry, MSc. Statistics, both from UW-Madison). His PhD was mixture of theoretical and field work in behavioral ecology (chasing lizards in Arizona and Brazil) and some statistics. During that time, he also worked on the comparative method in evolutionary biology. After finishing his PhD and before arriving at CNIO he worked as statistician in a company that developed artifical intelligence software and in a marketing research company.

During the last 20+ years he has worked mainly in the use of statistics and statistical computing in bioinformatics problems. For instance, classification problems, the usage of parallel computing for web-based stats applications for bioinformatics problems, and on the identification of DNA copy number alterations from aCGH data.

During the last 13 years or so, he has focused on trying to understand the sequence of driver genetic events and predict tumor evolution using cross-sectional data with so called "cancer progression models". These areas are currently his main focus: evolutionary accumulation models and evolutionary models of cancer, and he is trying to add to the mix phylogenetically-based comparative methods and approaches based on causal inference.

María Durban Reguera

Coherent cause-specific mortality forecasting via constrained penalized regression models

Biosketch

María Durbán holds a PhD in Mathematics from Heriot-Watt University, United Kingdom and she  is a Professor in the Department of Statistics at the Universidad Carlos III of Madrid since 2017. She has more than 20 years of experience in complex data modelling and its application in areas such as: Medicine, Environment, Insurance, etc. Transfer of knowledge has been very present throughout her career, both at the teaching level, giving courses in the field of modelling for different public institutions, and participating in numerous University-Business-Institutions projects focused on topics such as data analysis for decision-making or the impact evaluation of policies in both the public and private sectors.

Itziar Irigoien Garbizu

Title: TBA

Biosketch

I am graduated in Mathematics (1996) and PhD in Computer Science (2008) from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). Since 2011 associate lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence in the Faculty of Computer Science at the UPV/EHU. I am a member of the RSAIT research group, which works in the field of social robotics and integrates statistical and machine learning techniques to provide robots with greater autonomy. In addition, my research interests focus on the definition and development of statistical techniques to address biomedical and bioinformatics problems, particularly in distance-based data analysis techniques.

Rosa Lamarca Casado

Title: TBA

Biosketch

Rosa Lamarca is a highly experienced biostatistician leading the statistics team of the Bone and Rare Oncology therapeutic area at Alexion. She brings a holistic perspective to clinical development beyond pharmaceutical statistics. She enjoys developing diverse teams to face drug development challenges. Rosa has supported early and late-stage clinical development in various diseases with successful approvals by regulatory agencies and positive pricing and reimbursement evaluations by Health Technology Agencies. She was President of the Catalan Statistical Society, and the Spanish representative in the European Federation of Statisticians in the Pharmaceutical Industry. She is the co-author of more than 40 publications in peer reviewed biostatistics and medical journals.

Josu Najera-Zuloaga

Title: TBA

Biosketch

Josu Najera-Zuloaga is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). In January 2015, he began his Ph.D. studies at the Basque Center for Applied Mathematics - BCAM, supported by a Severo Ochoa predoctoral fellowship, and successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis in Mathematics and Statistics at UPV/EHU in December 2017. Throughout his academic journey, he has conducted research visits at prestigious institutions including the University of Manchester, Karolinska Institutet, and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. His primary research interest lies in developing statistical methodologies to address complex issues primarily encountered in clinical practice, with a particular focus on patient-centered healthcare through the use of patient-reported outcomes (PRO). The development of regression models for analyzing PRO is his main research focus. He also collaborates with clinicians from Galdakao-Usansolo Hospital on experimental research and with researchers from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia on multistate model development. Additionally, he participates in various funded research projects, groups, and networks, including the National Biostatistics Network (BIOSTATNET), the MATHMODE research group, and the RICAPPS Network (Red de Investigación en Cronicidad, Atención Primaria y Prevención y Promoción de la Salud). To date, he has authored 8 articles in JCR journals (5 in Q1), with an h-index of 4 (WoS) and over 80 citations (WoS), as well as more than 10 conference presentations.

Pere Puig Casado

Title: TBA

Biosketch

Pere Puig is professor of Statistics and Operations Research at the Department of Mathematics of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and an affiliate researcher at the Centre de Recerca Matemàtica (CRM). He leads the research group in advanced statistical modelling at this university and has extensive experience developing mathematical and statistical methods in collaboration with diverse groups, primarily in biology and health sciences. He has numerous papers in renowned scientific journals and is a frequent collaborator with the UK Health Security Agency.

María Xosé Rodríguez Álvarez

Title: TBA

Biosketch

María Xosé Rodríguez Álvarez earned her PhD in Mathematics from the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela in 2011 and has a diverse professional background spanning the private sector and academia. Since 2021, she has been a Ramón y Cajal fellow at the Universidade de Vigo. Her research focuses on (1) developing efficient estimation methods for flexible regression models, (2) statistically evaluating the diagnostic and prognostic value of clinical biomarkers, and (3) proposing new statistical methods for analysing spatial and spatio-temporal processes in the context of agricultural field experiments. Her work emphasises practical applications and interdisciplinary collaboration, with a strong commitment to disseminating advancements through free software.

Sonia Tarazona Campos

Title: TBA

Biosketch

Sonia Tarazona is an Associate Professor in the Department of Applied Statistics, Operations Research, and Quality at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), where she leads the BiostatOmics group, part of the Multivariate Statistical Engineering Group. Dr. Tarazona is a statistician who began her research career in Bioinformatics in 2008 and earned her PhD in Statistics and Optimization in 2014. Her research primarily focuses on developing statistical methods and software for omics data analysis and multi-omics data integration, resulting in several publicly available tools and R packages, including NOISeq, PaintOmics, MultiPower, MOSim, MORE, or COXMOS. Currently, Dr. Tarazona’s research interests is adapting these methodologies to emerging single-cell and spatial transcriptomics technologies.

Jacobo de Uña Álvarez

Title: TBA

Biosketch

Jacobo de Uña Álvarez is Professor in Statistics at the Universidade de Vigo, Galicia, Spain. His educational background includes a BSc in Mathematics (1995) and a PhD in Mathematical Statistics (1998), both at the University of Santiago de Compostela. Jacobo's main research area is nonparametric statistics and goodness-of-fit tests, and their application to Survival Analysis and high-dimensional data, including censored and truncated data, multi-state models and multiple testing. Along the years he has collaborated with leading researchers worldwide, publishing more than 100 papers in renowned journals like Biometrics, Bernoulli or Biometrika, among many others. He has recently co-authored the monograph The Statistical Analysis of Doubly Truncated Data: With Applications in R (Wiley, 2022). Jacobo coordinates SiDOR research group, founded in 1998, at the Universidade de Vigo.

Natalia Vilor Tejedor

Title: TBA

Biosketch

Dr. Natalia Vilor Tejedor holds a PhD in Biomedicine with a specialized MSc in omics data analysis and a foundational background in mathematics and statistics. With a focus on understanding the aetiology and prevention of neurological and neurodevelopmental disorders, Dr. Vilor-Tejedor explores the roles of both genetic and environmental risk factors. Currently leading the Genetic Neuroepidemiology and Biostatistics team at the BarcelonaBeta Brain Research Centre, she hold dual appointments with the Centre for Genomic Regulation and Radboud University Medical Center. Dr. Vilor-Tejedor integrates multiomics, environmental and neuroimaging data to uncover insights into neurodegenerative diseases, and is deeply committed to inclusive science, fostering mentorship, interdisciplinary collaboration, and public engagement.

Nora Amama Ben Hassun

Title: TBA

Biosketch

Leire Garmendia Bergés

Title: TBA

Biosketch

I graduated from the Universidad del País Vasco (UPV/EHU) with a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics (2020) and from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya-BarcelonaTECH (UPC)) with a Master’s degree in Statistics and Operations Research (2022). Since July 2023, I’ve been working at the Basque Center for Applied Mathematics (BCMA). In November 2023, I started my PhD studies in Mathematics and Statistics at the UPV/EHU under the supervision of Irantzu Barrio and Guadalupe Gómez Melis. My PhD project focuses on evaluating the predictive capacity of multistate models.

Laia Egea Cortés

Title: TBA

Biosketch

Pablo Flores Muñoz

Title: TBA

Biosketch

Pablo Flores is an engineer in Computer Statistics from the Escuela Superior Politécnica de Chimborazo (ESPOCH) and holds a master's degree in Statistics and Operations Research from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya-BarcelonaTECH (UPC), where he is currently a PhD candidate in Bioinformatics. He is a statistics teacher at ESPOCH and a researcher in the Data Science Research Group (CIDED) at ESPOCH and in the Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Research Group (GRBIO) at UPC. He also served as the director of the statistics programme at ESPOCH. Pablo has published in indexed journals and participated in national and international conferences. His work focuses on statistical methods for determining functional biological similarities between feature lists, leading to the development of the goSorensen package, available on Bioconductor since August 2022, with over three thousand downloads. Additionally, he has served as a reviewer for regional scientific journals and collaborated on relevant research projects.

Pavla Krotka

Title: TBA

Biosketch

I graduated from the University of Vienna with a Bachelor’s degree in Statistics (2020) and a Master’s degree in Data Science (2023). Between 2020 and 2024, I worked at the Center for Medical Data Science at the Medical University of Vienna. Here I was engaged in statistical consulting for medical doctors from the Vienna General Hospital, as well as methodological research on clinical trial designs. In July 2024, I started my PhD studies in Statistics and Operations Research at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya-BarcelonaTECH (UPC)) supported by the Joan Oró Fellowship, under the supervision of Marta Bofill Roig. My PhD project focuses on enhancing the analysis of adaptive platform trials by incorporating non-concurrent controls.

Natalia Pallarés Fontanet

Title: TBA

Biosketch

Natàlia Pallarès has a degree in Mathematics (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya-BarcelonaTECH (UPC)), 2012), a Master’s degree in Statistics and Operations Research (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya-BarcelonaTECH (UPC)-Universitat de Barcelona (UB), 2014) and is currently enrolled in a PhD programme in Medicine and Translational Research PhD (UB). She has worked as a statistician at the Hospital del Mar Research Institute (IMIM), at the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) and, since 2023, as a senior statistician at the Biostatistics Unit of the Germans Trias i Pujol Research Institute and Hospital (IGTP). Since 2018, she also works as an associate lecturer at UB.

Andrea Toloba López-Egea

Title: TBA

Biosketch

Andrea Toloba is graduated in Mathematics at the University of Barcelona (2019) and pursued the Master's degree in Statistics and Operations Research (MESIO Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya-BarcelonaTECH (UPC)-UB). During her MSc studies, she worked as statistician in the Epidemiology and public health Programme for Cardiovascular diseases at the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM). Since September 2022, she is a PhD Student in the Statistics and Operations Research Programme at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya-BarcelonaTECH (UPC)), under the supervision of Prof. Guadalupe Gómez Melis and Prof. Klaus Langohr. Her research interests are in survival analysis and interval censoring, in particular her PhD project focuses on regression models with interval-censored covariates.