28 March, 2024
Dr. Jordi Abante – Junior Leader “la Caixa” Foundation (Basic Research)
DR. JORDI ABANTE, POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCHER AT CREATIO, OBTAINS A GRANT FROM THE JUNIOR LEADER FELLOWSHIPS - INCOMING PROGRAM OF "LA CAIXA" FOUNDATION
Dr. Jordi Abante, with 10 years of experience in the field of computational biology and currently a postdoctoral researcher at Creatio, Production and Validation center of Advanced Therapies at the University of Barcelona, has been selected as one of the twenty-five beneficiaries of the Junior Leader Fellowships – Incoming awarded by “La Caixa” Foundation in March 2024.
The grant will enable Dr. Jordi Abante to advance his research focused on the development of computational methods for studyingHuntington’s Disease. Firstly, a predictive model of the age of onset of disease symptoms will be developed based on the patient’s genotype, which will help identify genetic modifiers with the potential to open new therapeutic approaches. This model will take advantage of recent advances in the field of artificial intelligence (graph neural networks) and will be trained using recently data obtained from Enroll-HD. On the other hand, a series of methods based on deep generative models will be developed. This will allow to integrate data from different modalities (e.g., scRNA-seq, calcium recordings) obtained from animal models, cell cultures, and human samples. This work will facilitate the characterization of populations affected by this disease at both the transcriptomic and functional levels within a shared framework, allowing for the study of their transcriptomic perturbations.
Dr. Abante, after graduating in Industrial Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (2014), moved to the United States to specialize in the field of computational biology. There, he completed a Master’s in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University. After that, he was awarded by “La Caixa” grant to pursue his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, along with a Master’s in Applied Mathematics and Statistics. After obtaining his PhD in 2021, he continued his career as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, where he received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Center for Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics. In 2023, he joined the University of Barcelona as a postdoctoral researcher at Creatio, led by Prof. Josep M. Canals (Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences) and the Computer Vision and Machine Learninggroup, under the supervision of Prof. Petia Radeva (Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics). Currently, Dr. Abante also serves as an adjunct professor at this same faculty.
Junior Leader Fellowships – Incoming is a highly competitive grant. It received 232 applications, of which only 25 were awarded. This fellowship will allow Dr. Abante to conosolidate and stabilize his scientific career in the fields of bioinformatics and computational biology at the University of Barcelona. The fellowship has a duration of 3 years, offering a competitive salary and a maximum award of 40.000€ per year for research-related expenses, along with a training program in transversal skills. The aim of awarding Junior Leader scholarships to young researchers is to attract and retain individuals with a high-impact scientific background in Spanish research centers of excellence.