PhD student Theoretical Chemistry and Computational Modelling, Madrid

Doctorate in Spain, 2019

  Born in Huesca in 1995. In 2013 he finished high school obtaining both the Spanish and International Baccalaureate Diploma. That same year he started his undergraduate studies in Biotechnology, at Universitat de Barcelona, and Mathematics, at Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia. During the BSc studies he started to raise interest in the theoretical modelling of biological systems, in particular, when he started an internship at Dr. Orozco's group at IRB Barcelona. He spent the last semester of his undergraduate studies in Cologne (Germany) thanks to the Erasmus program, where he got deeper in the genetics involved in proteostasis in C. elegans. After graduating in Biotechnology in 2017, he moved to Madrid to start an Erasmus Mundus Master program in Theoretical Chemistry and Computational Modeling at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. As a part of his early career learning, he obtained a scholarship from "Cátedra UAM-Fujitsu" to cover tuition fees and  a "Beca de Colaboración" during the first year of the master to study the photophysics of non-canonical nucleobases and its possible role in early evolution of life. After the first year of the master, he did an intensive course in Perugia (Italy) for a month as a part of his studies, before moving to Groningen (The Netherlands). In Groningen, he started to learn about his future PhD project while finishing his MSc thesis. Funding for his stay in Groningen came from a Erasmus scholarship and a HPC-Europe3, both providing computational resources and life expenses. In October 2019, he started his PhD studies on "Theoretical insight of new-generation molecular motors", at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid jointly with University of Groningen, under the supervision of Prof. Inés Corral and Prof. Shirin Faraji. This project, fully funded by LaCaixa Foundation, aims at deciphering why and how this promising molecular machines work, while helping the development of new systems with direct applications in the field of biotechnology, nanotechnology or biomedicine.