Ana M Rojas

Biography

I lead the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Group at the Centro Andaluz de Biología del Desarrollo (CABD), part of the María de Maeztu Excellence Unit, since December 2018. I am a CSIC Research Scientist (Investigadora Científica) with a background in biology and a specialization in bioinformatics and computational biology. My research focuses on protein function and prediction, using AI techniques to drive research in these areas.

I began my PhD about microbial taxonomy and molecular Biology in Madrid, Spain, and completed it in Michael McClelland’s lab at the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center (SKCC) in La Jolla, California. Afterward, I returned to McClelland’s lab for postdoctoral research before earning a NASA fellowship to join R.F. Doolittle’s lab at UC San Diego (UCSD). I later worked as an associate postdoctoral researcher in A. Godzik’s lab at The Burnham Institute, San Diego. After six years in the U.S., I returned to Spain in 2003 to join Alfonso Valencia’s lab at CNB-CSIC with a Marie Curie International Reintegration Grant. I then accepted a staff scientist position at the Spanish National Cancer Research Center (CNIO) in Madrid before becoming an independent Group Leader at the Institute for Predictive and Personalized Medicine of Cancer (IMPPC) in 2009, later moving to the Institute of Biomedicine of Seville.

I have established and managed High-Performance Computing (HPC) Facilities, and my research has resulted in ~60 peer-reviewed articles and over 50 oral presentations at international venues. I have trained students and professionals at all levels, including PhD candidates, Master's students, and postdoctoral researchers. Additionally, I am very active in outreach activities, contributing to general media through podcasts, newspapers, and delivering talks at high schools. I am currently a funded scientist with national grants from the Agencia Española de Investigación (AEI) and European funding from the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC-OSCAR).

I serve on the editorial board of Nucleic Acids Research Genomics and Bioinformatics (NARGAB), am part of the ERGA network, and am a research member of the Google Spain-University of Seville Chair for AI. I am also President of the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) of IMIB and a founding member of the Spanish Society for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (SEBiBC). Since 2024, I have been a member of the ICSB COSI function and serve on the executive board of the CSIC BCB.HUB, a dedicated network of computational biologists in Spain.