Rui Alves

Dr. Alves is a Full Professor of Bioinformatics and Computational Systems and Synthetic biology at the University of Lleida, with a Ph. D. in Theoretical Biochemistry from the University of Michigan/University of Lisbon in 2000. He had post-doctoral research stays at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London and at the University of California Davis, before becoming a Ramon y Cajal Research Scientist, and then an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the Universitat de Lleida (UdL). He was the director of the University of Lleida's Ph. D. program in Health from January 2015 to February 2019 and he is now UdL's local director for both, the Catalan Interuniversity Ph. D. Program in Bioinformatics and the Master in Biomedical Data Science. Since March 2019 he is also the Vice-Chair of the Ciències Mèdiques Bàsiques department at UdL's Faculty of Medicine.

His research into the design principles of molecular circuits, synthetic biology of yeasts and cereals, and the development and use of computational tools and big data technologies in health and in agriculture significantly contributed to understand how the design of molecular circuits affects their efficiency, and how that efficiency may correlate to the fitness of individuals. This led to applications in Microbial and Plant Synthetic Biology, contributing to the development of maize strains that are more nutritive and resistant to drought and parasites. His research was published in approximately 70 research articles in international journals, has an H-index of 28 (Google Scholar), an H10-index of 50 (Google Scholar) and an H-100 of 8. More than 40 of those papers are in Q1 Journals. In more than half of the 70 articles, he is either first author or corresponding author. His research led him to be involved in more than 20 competitive research projects, both national and international, of which he has lead, co-lead, or been workpackage coordinator in 9 of them.

He led, co-led, or participated in the development and transfer of over ten software tools or packages, seven of which in the last ten years. These were all open source tools, made available to the community over the web. He has also transferred knowledge and expertise through the creation of a Scientific and Technical Service on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, which he runs since 2021 at the University of Lleida.