People

Irene Otero-Muras

Chemical engineer by training, I did my PhD in applied mathematics at the BioProcess Engineering Group (CSIC) under the supervision of Antonio A. Alonso and Julio R. Banga. Since the beginning of my scientific career I was interested in understanding the complex dynamic behavior of biomolecular networks and its connection with relevant biological functions. During my postdoc at ETH (D-BSSE) with J Stelling, I became familiar with the open questions and challenges in systems and synthetic biology. Back at CSIC I started my work on the automated design of biocircuits for synthetic biology and on efficient methods for stochastic modeling and simulation of gene regulatory networks, helping to provide insight on cellular decisions under stochastic noise. One of my fundamental research aims is to understand the role of molecular noise in relevant cellular functions and exploit this knowledge for the advanced design, analysis and control of biosystems.

Publications and other merits

Hamza Faquir

I’m currently a PhD fellow with the CSIC group COMPUTATIONAL SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY under the supervision of Dr. Irene Otero-Muras,as part of the MSCA-ITN-2020 project E-MUSE. I had my first master’s degree from the Faculty of sciences and technologies Marrakech, on Mathematical modeling and PDE analysis, Then I joined Lyon 1 university for a master’s degree in Mathematics for biology and medicine. I’m generally interested in the application of mathematical deterministic and probabilistic methods to explore biological networks, and to have better insights on biosystems that can lead to several applications in biomedical sciences and industrial biotechnology. My doctoral research will be focused on feedback control of individual cells in microorganism populations, more precisely, we will be working on developing a novel control paradigm to guide the modulation of the underlying stochastic gene circuits of bacterial systems that regulate metabolic activity and therefore phenotype heterogeneity through the available environmental stress variables. Through the collaboration with different research groups in the E-muse project, we will apply our results on processes of importance to the fermented food industry.

Christian Fernández

After graduating as a mathematician from the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC), I started a master’s degree in Industrial Mathematics (M2i) in 2020, specialising in mathematical modelling. After completing these studies, I had the opportunity to do an internship at the CSIC, specifically at the Institute of Integrative Systems Biology (I²SysBio), on the control of biomolecular networks for synthetic biology applications using PIDE model-based control, under the supervision of Dr. Irene Otero-Muras and Dr. Manuel Pájaro Diéguez. Thanks to the Gain Oportunius Grant, I started working for the CSIC, where I have been able to give continuity to the studies started during my internship. My research project consists of developing, by means of control theory methods, nonlinear analysis and PIDE models, analysis and control strategies for biomolecular networks and biocircuits in presence of high molecular noise, understanding the emergent propoperties in presence of noise, and controling cell populations in different scenarios of interest in systems and synthetic biology.

Ramón Catalán

I’m a physics undergraduate student at the University of Valencia currently doing an internship at I2SysBio thanks to the “Alumn colaborador” program promoted by my university under the supervision of Dr. Irene Otero-Muras. My interests lie in the analysis of complex dynamical biosystems, a hallmark of systems biology, mainly in the context biochemical reaction networks , including gene regulatory networks and signalling pathways. My current research project involves using bifurcation theory to analyse novel phenomena observed in biological systems far from the thermodynamic limit (low copy numbers and highly stochastic behaviour) that cannot be explained by the standard deterministic analysis.