María Rodríguez Martínez, PhD, MSc

Prof. María Rodríguez Martínez is an Associate Professor in Biomedical Informatics & Data Science at the Yale School of Medicine. Before joining Yale, she was the Technical Leader of Systems Biology at IBM Research Europe (Switzerland), where she established the team of computational systems biology. Initially trained as a physicist, she transitioned to computational biology during her postdoctoral work at the Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel) and Columbia University (USA). At IBM Research, her research centered on developing computational approaches for cancer personalized medicine and she led two major EU-funded consortia focused on prostate and pediatric cancers.

Currently, her work focuses on understanding T and B cell function in the context of complex diseases, such as cancer and autoimmune diseases. Her research integrates mechanistic and AI models, emphasizing interpretable deep learning methods to uncover the rules behind model predictions. In this field, her team has developed interpretable models to predict T cell receptor binding and investigated B cell development.

Prof. Rodríguez Martínez serves as an editor for ImmunoInformatics, Frontiers in Systems Biology, BMC Bioinformatics, and IEEE Transactions on Molecular, Biological, and Multi-Scale Communications. She is also a frequent speaker and organizing committee member at leading Computational and Mathematical Biology conferences, such as ISMB, the Society for Mathematical Biology, and ECCB.