Associate Professor, TECNUN Escuela de Ingeniería, Donostia - San Sebastian

Postgrau a Estats Units, 2009

Dr. Ochoa graduated with B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Navarra, Spain, in 2009. She then went to Stanford, where she obtained a MS and a PhD in the Electrical Engineering Department, in 2012 and 2016, respectively. During her time at Stanford Dr. Ochoa performed internships as a software engineering at Google, CA and at Genapsys, CA. She also served as a technical consultant for the HBO show “Silicon Valley”.
After obtaining the PhD, Dr. Ochoa joined the faculty at the Electrical and Computing Engineering department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), as an assistant professor, in January 2017. After three years at UIUC, Dr. Ochoa joined the faculty at Tecnun as a collaborator professor in January 2020. She still holds an adjunct faculty position at UIUC and continues advising her PhD students.
Her research interests include computational biology, data compression, bioinformatics, information theory and coding, machine learning, communications, and signal processing. In particular, her research focuses on the development of computational methods tailored to omics data, to aid the storage, handling, and analysis of these data. She has developed several compression algorithms for genomic, methylation and mass spectrometry data that are currently the state-of-the-art, as well as novel computational tools to improve the genomic analysis pipeline, such as a novel variant filtering tool based on ensemble methods.
Dr. Ochoa is recipient of the Stanford Graduate Fellowship, La Caixa Graduate Fellowship, and an award for excellence from the Basque Government. She has also been recently awarded the MIT Innovators under 35 award, the Gipuzkoa Fellows, and a Ramon y Cajal grant.