Biosketch

Dec 2024-present Independent Fellow, Centre de Regulació Genòmica, Barcelona Collaboratorium for Mathematical Modelling and Predictive Biology, Spain
2024-present Junior Group Leader, Centre de Recerca Matemàtica, Spain
2023-2024 Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Glasgow - CRUK Scotland Institute, United Kingdom
2019-2024 Cross-Disciplinary Fellow, University of Edinburgh - Institute of Genetics and Cancer, United Kingdom
2018 Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Instituto de Ciencias Matemáticas, Spain
2013-2018 PhD in Mathematics, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid/ICMAT, Spain

Summary

Cellular aging refers to the progressive deterioration of cellular function over time. Unlike diseases with discrete initiating events, aging involves the slow, complex accumulation of molecular and cellular changes, requiring systems biology approaches and novel computational and mathematical methods. A central question is to characterize the fundamental mechanisms driving the diversity of aging phenotypes observed across scales: species, individuals, and cells.

My research addresses this challenge by developing mathematical frameworks that model aging hallmarks as emergent properties of stem cell dynamics. In clonal hematopoiesis (CHIP), I apply evolutionary population dynamics to track, in vivo, how somatic mutations accumulate and expand over time, revealing how individual-specific microenvironments modulate fitness and disease progression. For epigenetic aging, I conceptualize methylation changes as stochastic epimutations occurring during cell replication, connecting aging speed mechanistically to cellular turnover rates. This mechanistic framework transforms aging biomarkers from statistical correlations into quantitative measurements of fundamental cellular processes, opening new avenues for understanding what controls health- and lifespan variation across species and individuals.