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LMCB - Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology

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Pablo Vicente Munuera's picture
Research Associate, Mao Lab
 
p.munuera@ucl.ac.uk
 
 
 

Research synopsis

Hi! I am Pablo, a computer scientist tackling biological problems. The organs in our body serve a variety of functions. These functions depend on the shape of the organ, which, in turn, depends on how the cells are structured. Shape and function are very related in nature! I am intrigued by how epithelial cells change their shape in three dimensions (3D) depending on the forces appearing in the tissue and what are its effects on the tissue they belong to. To study this, I am analysing wound healing movies of the Drosophila wing disc to see how cells adapt to disruptions in tissue mechanical dynamics. For that, I am using image analysis techniques and machine learning to transform the images from the microscope to objects inside a computer (they belong to ‘a’ matrix now!), and computer simulations to analyse what forces give rise to certain shapes.

Biography

2020 | PhD in Computational Biology | University of Seville and Institute of Biomedicine of Seville (IbiS) |  Seville, Spain
2016 | Magister in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology | Instituto of Health Carlos III (ISCIII) | Madrid, Spain
2015 | Degree in Information Theory | University of Alicante | Spain
 

Awards

1st place at HackForGood Global 2018 (Telefonica, Spain)

Research themes

Polarity and cell shape
Computational biology
Tissue mechanics
 

Technology

Image analysis
Computational modeling
Machine learning