XV Congress of the Argentine Association for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (A²B²C)

Rodrigo F. Díaz is Associate Dean of the School of Management and Technology at ITBA, Independent Researcher at CONICET, and professor at UNSAM. His research applies statistical and machine learning methods to detect exoplanets in radial velocity data, separating planetary signals from stellar activity. He founded the Bachelor’s in Data Science at UNSAM and led the creation of ITBA’s Master’s in Artificial Intelligence.

Anna Strachotová is a Czech scientific project manager and the National Node Coordinator for ELIXIR CZ (the Czech National Infrastructure for Biological Data), based at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry (IOCB) of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. Since 2018, she has served as Node Coordinator and Project Manager for ELIXIR CZ, working within Jiří Vondrášek’s bioinformatics research group at IOCB Prague.

Juliana Vianna is a researcher at the Molecular Biodiversity Laboratory at Universidad Andrés Bello (UNAB) and the Center for Genome Regulation (CRG), Chile. She holds a PhD in Biological Sciences, specializing in Ecology, from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (2010). Her research examines the effects of glacial cycles on Antarctic and sub-Antarctic biodiversity. She leads projects in genomic regulation and long-read DNA sequencing, and has participated in graduate teaching and supervision in ecology, evolutionary biology, and conservation medicine.

Laura Kamenetzky graduated in Biology in 2001 and earned her PhD in Molecular Biology in 2007 from the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences, University of Buenos Aires (UBA). She conducted postdoctoral research at the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA). She is a Principal Researcher at CONICET, based at the Institute of Biosciences, Biotechnology and Translational Biology (iB3-UBA). Her research focuses on genomics and bioinformatics of eukaryotes. She has coordinated research projects funded by Argentine and European institutions and organized scientific events and workshops in helminth research, bioinformatics, and genomics.

Jimena Rinaldi is a structural biochemist and group leader of the Photobiology and Optogenetics Laboratory at the Institute of Nanosystems, Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM), Argentina. She earned her degree in Biological Sciences and her PhD in Biological Chemistry at the University of Buenos Aires, studying the structure of the PKA regulatory subunit. As a postdoctoral fellow and later CONICET researcher at the Instituto Leloir, she focused on how bacteria sense light, uncovering the molecular mechanisms of the Brucella blue-light histidine kinase and of bacteriophytochromes, red/far-red photoreceptors. Her work combines X-ray crystallography, cryo-EM, biochemistry, and spectroscopy. Her lab now also develops optogenetic tools based on bacteriophytochromes to control proteins of biotechnological and clinical interest. She has led national research grants, supervises doctoral and undergraduate students.

Marcelo A. Martí holds a PhD from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), is a Senior Researcher at CONICET and an Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Chemistry at the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences, UBA. He also serves as Secretary of Graduate Studies at the faculty. His work focuses on bioinformatics, with applications in protein biochemistry and clinical genomics. He combines molecular simulations and genomic data analysis to study protein function, contribute to drug design, and improve the interpretation of variants associated with rare diseases.

He has authored more than 200 scientific publications and led numerous national and international research projects, with a strong commitment to training researchers. He contributed to the creation of bioinformatics courses and the UBA School of Clinical Genomics. His distinctions include the 2018 Houssay Award and recognition in MIT Technology Review’s TR35 Argentina-Uruguay in 2012. He is a scientific co-founder of Bitgenia, an Argentine genomics and bioinformatics company focused on diagnostic and precision medicine applications.

Esteban Mocskos is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences, University of Buenos Aires, and an Independent Researcher at CONICET. He directs the Interdisciplinary High-Performance Computing Laboratory (LICAR), whose research spans computer architecture, distributed systems, and large-scale applications.

He participates in the management and operation of HPC infrastructure at the Center for Computational Simulation for Technological Applications (CSC-CONICET), which hosted the TUPAC supercomputer for several years. He currently coordinates the governance committee of Clementina XXI, the high-performance computing system that marked Argentina’s first entry in the TOP500 ranking.

His experience combines the acquisition, administration, and management of high-performance computing systems, the coordination of technical teams, and research in computer architecture and distributed systems.

He has also contributed to the regional and international HPC community as a co-founder and Steering Committee member of CARLA (the Latin American and Caribbean High-Performance Computing Conference) and as General Co-Chair of ISCA 2024, the leading international computer architecture conference, held in Latin America for the first time in its 50 editions.

Rodrigo Nores is a bioanthropologist specializing in paleogenomics. He received his PhD in Chemical Sciences from the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (UNC) in 2006. He currently works as a CONICET Researcher at the Instituto de Antropología de Córdoba (IDACOR) and is a Full Professor in the Anthropology undergraduate program at the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities (UNC). His work focuses on reconstructing the evolutionary history of human populations and pathogens in South America through ancient DNA analysis, conducting research in collaboration with international reference centers such as the Department of Genetics at Harvard University and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA).

Full Professor in Bioinformatics and Principal Investigator at the BioComputing UP lab of the Department of Biomedical Sciences, Università degli Studi di Padova. His research focuses on bioinformatics and computational biology, particularly on the structural and mechanistic aspects of complex biological systems.

Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. His research focuses on protein structure, protein misfolding, conformational diseases, and the development of therapeutic molecules.

Computer scientist specialized in algorithmic robotics and Research Director at CNRS. His interdisciplinary research combines robotics, artificial intelligence, and structural bioinformatics approaches.

Human Population Geneticist, CONICET Researcher and Full Professor at Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. His research focuses on human population genetics, ancient DNA, population genomics, and the application of bioinformatics and machine learning to evolutionary and biomedical studies.

Professor of Bioinformatics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. His research interests include computational biology, protein and gene function analysis, and data mining approaches in molecular biology.

Leader of the Molecular Systems Cluster at EMBL-EBI. His work focuses on systems biology resources, molecular interaction databases, pathways, and biological data standardization.

Principal Investigator at CONICET and Head of the Structural Bioinformatics Unit at Fundación Instituto Leloir. Her research focuses on protein structure and evolution, intrinsically disordered proteins, aggregation, and machine learning applications in bioinformatics.

Research Director at CNRS and Team Leader at the University of Montpellier. Trained in Physics and an expert in NMR spectroscopy for Structural Biology, her research focuses on intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs), post-translational modifications, and the molecular mechanisms regulating GPCR and arrestin interactions.

Technical Officer at ELIXIR, supporting the activities of the Data, Interoperability and Compute Platforms. He holds a BSc in Biotechnology and an MSc in Biomedical Genomics, with research experience focused on the gut microbiome and colorectal cancer.

ELIXIR Communities and Services Coordinator. He promotes collaboration between ELIXIR Nodes and the ELIXIR Hub and leads the development of research communities associated with ELIXIR use cases. He has extensive experience in computational biology, bioinformatics leadership, and research infrastructure management.

Assistant Professor and Principal Investigator at the Department of Biochemistry at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Hungary, where he leads the Protein Dynamics Research Group. Trained as a bioengineer, he holds a PhD in structural biochemistry and has a decade of experience in bioinformatics. His career spans ten years of academic research alongside specialized experience in the pharmaceutical industry, with professional activity in Argentina and extensive collaborations across Europe, particularly in Italy and Israel. His research expertise centers on the characterization of intrinsically disordered proteins through the integration of biophysical concepts and advanced computational approaches. His work focuses on developing novel predictive methods for both general and functional protein disorder, with the goal of bridging artificial intelligence and biophysics. To this end, he employs a broad range of methodologies that includes machine learning, molecular dynamics simulations, and statistical mechanics to investigate the complex behavior and functional roles of intrinsically disordered proteins. He serves as Co-lead of the ELIXIR IDP Community and as the Hungarian Representative for COST. He is also a core member of the ML4NGP COST action, IDP2Biomed twinning project and a contributor of the IDPFun2 project.

Salvador Capella-Gutierrez, PhD, leads the Technologies for Biomedical Research Laboratory at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), as well as the Coordination team of the Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute (INB). INB is the Spanish node of ELIXIR, the European research infrastructure for life science data. Salvador joined the BSC in July 2017 from the Spanish National Cancer Research Center (CNIO) in Madrid. A bioinformatician with a solid technological background in both Computer Engineering and Health Sciences, Salvador received his PhD in Bioinformatics in 2012, awarded by the Center for Genomic Regulation and Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain.

His current focus is on developing long-term infrastructure to facilitate the scientific benchmarking and technical evaluation of research software in Life Sciences, including tools, web services, and workflows. More recently, he is interested in how to further elevate those efforts to continue serving the research community in the fast-evolving AI context.

Researcher at the National Laboratory of Scientific Computing and former President of AB3C. Her work focuses on genomics, metagenomics, transcriptomics, and computational methods for genomics.

Head of the Bioinformatics Group at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences (IOCB Prague) and Head of ELIXIR CZ. His research focuses on structural bioinformatics, computational structural biology, molecular modeling, protein evolution, and biomolecular interactions.

Researcher at the Center for Bioinformatics, Simulation and Modeling at Universidad de Talca. Her research focuses on computational structural biology of membrane proteins, molecular modeling, docking simulations, and molecular dynamics.