María Rodríguez Martínez, PhD, has been recruited as Associate Professor in the new department of biomedical informatics and data science, effective May, 2024. Rodríguez Martínez’s interdisciplinary research combines machine learning, computational biology and mathematical approaches to unravel the molecular mechanisms of complex diseases like cancer. Her work seeks to integrate artificial intelligence and mechanistic approaches to produce robust models that require less training data, and to develop methods for interpreting the predictions of “black box” models.
Rodríguez Martínez joins Yale School of Medicine with her husband, Claus Horn, PhD, who will serve as an Associate Research Scientist exploring the intersection of machine learning and biomedical applications.
“Dr. Martínez is a great addition to BIDS and will greatly enhance our growing computational biology research and education portfolio," said Lucila Ohno-Machado, MD, PhD, MBA, deputy dean and chair of biomedical informatics at Yale School of Medicine. "She brings international leadership experience in large projects and a network of collaborators."
Rodríguez Martínez was previously Technical Leader of Systems Biology at IBM Research Europe, where she developed predictive models for precision medicine and personalized cancer therapies. At Yale School of Medicine, she will continue to focus on the development of both machine learning and mechanistic models of the immune system to enhance the design of novel cell-based immunotherapies against cancer. She earned her PhD in physics at Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, before transitioning to quantitative and computational biology during her postdoctoral work at the Weizmann Institute of Science and Columbia University.
Rodríguez Martínez is an editor for many peer-reviewed journals, including ImmunoInformatics, Frontiers in Systems Biology, BMC Bioinformatics, and IEEE Transactions on Molecular, Biological, and Multi-Scale Communications. She is a frequent speaker and organizing committee member at leading Computational and Mathematical Biology conferences, such as ISMB, the Society for Mathematical Biology, and ECCB.