The CRM Welcomes 3 New Members of its Staff

Three new people joined the CRM during the month of April, both to work with research groups and with the research support team.

The Centre de Recerca Matemàtica continues to grow with the recent addition of a postdoctoral researcher, a research technician, and a data steward. María da Fonseca is joining the Neuroscience research group as a postdoctoral fellow to work with Alexandre Hyafil on the Computational model for daily fluctuations in psychological states project. The project aims to predict possibly pathological changes in a person’s mood based on the decisions that are recorded daily on their mobile phone. María has a degree in physics and a doctorate from the Instituto Balseiro, in Argentina. Before joining the CRM, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Centro Atómico Bariloche, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and Universidad de Buenos Aires. Her most recent position was as an associate professor at the Universidad Nacional de Río Negro.

This April we have also welcomed Laura Orrit, who joins the Mathematical & Computational Biology group to work with Josep Sardanyés on the project HENOCANDYN: HEterogeneity and NOise as engines of CANcer evolution: A multiscale DYNamical systems approach. The aim of this project is to further develop our research on the role of heterogeneity in cancer, identify routes to and mechanisms of resistance to treatment, and, finally, evaluate the rational design of combinatorial therapies involving existing drugs and prescribe new therapeutic strategies to overcome the effects of heterogeneity. Laura completed her Bachelor’s in Biomedical Engineering at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in 2021. During the last year of the degree, she performed her Bachelor Thesis, where I was involved in a modeling project focused on the design and development of a computational model to study the dynamics of a heterogeneous population of cancer cells with evolving immunogenicity, in interaction with regulatory and practical T cells.

Finally, the CRM Research Support Team has hired Ariadna Gutiérrez as data steward. Ariadna studied Physics at Universitat de Barcelona, specializing in Fundamental Physics, and she continued her studies with an MSc. in Astrophysics, Particle Physics, and Cosmology at Universitat de Barcelona. She has given dissemination sessions related to Astronomy, which included the observation of celestial bodies, and other dissemination sessions related to Women in Science, aimed to encourage children and teenagers to pursue a degree in Science. Ariadna joins the CRM research support team as a Data Stewart thanks to the INVESTIGO program. As a data steward, her role will be to design and monitor data management plans for research projects, collaborate with the researchers in the collection and maintenance of data, and propose solutions to transform them into FAIR data. She will also contribute to the CRM strategy in open science and to the maintenance and updating of the institutional repository.

 We want to welcome them to the CRM community and wish them a very fruitful time with us!