Pol Castellano Escuder

Pol Castellano Escuder

Postdoctoral Researcher

Duke Molecular Physiology Institute

I obtained my Bachelor degree in Biology at the University of Barcelona in June 2016 and my Master degree in Bioinformatics and Biostatistics at the University of Barcelona and the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) in July 2017. During my Bachelor and Master degree studies, I conducted research on the discovery of epigenetic and metabolomic biomarkers in childhood obesity and diabetes at the Sant Joan de Déu pediatric hospital in Barcelona (Spain).

In September 2021, I obtained my Ph.D. in Biomedicine (Bioinformatics major) working in the departments of Nutrition and Metabolomics and Statistics and Bioinformatics of the University of Barcelona. During my Ph.D., my research was focused on food metabolomics, software development, predictive modeling and machine learning algorithms, and development of biological ontologies. I finished my Ph.D. having developed an ontology named FOBI, which was the first ontology in the field of nutritional metabolomics, and also five web applications and two R/Bioconductor packages focusing on omics data analysis, which were published in high-impact journals in the field of bioinformatics.

I recently joined Duke University as a postdoctoral researcher at the Hirschey Lab. Currently, my research focuses on software development for biological sciences and omics data integration using Deep Learning algorithms to address questions about the relationships between different omic fields and data sources, improving the knowledge of these relationships in the complex biological networks of organisms and phenotypes.

Interests

  • Omics
  • Statistics
  • Deep learning/AI
  • Software Development

Education

  • Ph.D. in Biomedicine (Bioinformatics), 2021

    University of Barcelona

  • MS in Bioinformatics and Biostatistics, 2017

    Open University of Barcelona and University of Barcelona

  • BS in Biology, 2016

    University of Barcelona