Computational Genomics

Bachelor’s Degree in Biology, specialising in fundamentals (UB)
PhD in Health and Life Sciences (UPF)

Josep Abril’s research focuses on the computational sequence analysis of omics projects and their annotation, from assembly through to the functional description of genes and genomes, their integration in interaction networks, modelling eukaryotic signals and genic structures, visualising genomic features (such as in his 2001 Science paper on the Human Genome Map) and describing viral communities from metagenomic samples, among others. His favourite organisms are planarians, flies and humans, though not necessarily in that order. He has been involved in a number of major gene-finding accuracy assessments, including fly GASP and human EGASP/RGASP.

PhD in Genetics (UB)

Maria Cinta Pegueroles has a Bachelor’s Degree in Biology (2006) and a PhD in Genetics (2010) from the Universitat de Barcelona (UB). She worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Fundació Institut Hospital del Mar d’Investigacions Mèdiques (FIMIM), the Parc Científic de Barcelona (PCB), the Vall d’Hebron Institut de Recerca (VHIR) and the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), and as a research engineer at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). She is currently an associate lecturer at the Universitat de Barcelona and a course instructor at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

She is a biologist specialising in genetics and bioinformatics. Her main research interests are population genomics, evolution and adaptation. Her overall goal is to understand how genomes evolve using large-scale data; in particular, she is interested in understanding the genetic basis of adaptation and deciphering the functionality of long non-coding genes, as well as their role in genome evolution and adaptation. To do so, she uses both an evolutionary perspective that provides information of ancient events and a population perspective that provides information about more recent events.