IMFD Researcher Gonzalo Navarro is named ISCB Fellow
The academic from the Department of Computer Science of Universidad de Chile and researcher at the Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data (IMFD), Gonzalo Navarro, was distinguished as a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), one of the most relevant international recognitions in computational biology and bioinformatics. The distinction is part of the ISCB Fellows program, created in 2009 to honor members who have stood out for their outstanding contributions to these fields, as well as for their leadership, service, and contribution to the scientific community.
ISCB, founded in 1997, is the only society that represents computational biology and bioinformatics on a global scale. It currently brings together a global community of more than 4,000 researchers, professionals, technicians, students, and industry representatives, all dedicated to advancing the scientific understanding of living systems through computation.
“ISCB Fellows have played a fundamental role in advancing bioinformatics and computational biology, shaping the field through innovation and collaboration. This prestigious distinction reflects a track record of significant impact and dedication to the scientific community,” state the program’s guidelines.
For the academic, this recognition represents a milestone in a career linked to an area that has gained great relevance in recent decades. He recalls that, in 1998, when he was planning to do part of his postdoctoral studies in Arizona with researcher Gene Myers, his plans changed because Myers joined Celera Genomics, one of the companies that took part in sequencing the first human genome.
“That happened around the year 2000 and was the beginning of a career that continues to this day, sequencing entire populations, understanding what is in the genome, and using it to understand and cure diseases. You could say that is the point at which massive-data bioinformatics was born, bringing enormous algorithmic challenges related to complex searches in sequences and efficient storage of large volumes of information,” he says.
The academic notes that, although his approach has been mainly algorithmic rather than biological, “several of the things we did over these past two decades have ended up being used in bioinformatics research and even in widely used products.”
Contributions from computer science
The researcher explains that his work in bioinformatics has developed along three main lines. First, approximate text search, focused on finding patterns efficiently even while allowing for errors, which in bioinformatics come from mutations and sequencing errors, among others. Then, compressed self-indexes, which make it possible to store sequences such as genomes or proteins using nearly the minimum space while still performing efficient searches. Finally, his most recent line of work addresses the indexing of large collections of repetitive sequences, a key challenge when working with many genomes that are very similar to one another.
In this field, he explains that the representation must occupy a space close to what is needed to represent one of the sequences plus the few changes required to obtain each of the others. “That’s not difficult in itself, but offering complex pattern searches within that space is,” he stated. He began this work a couple of decades ago with researchers from Finland, whom he met during his postdoctoral studies, in what he describes as “a time when almost no one cared much about the problem, but today it’s crucial and many people work on it.”
After receiving this recognition, Professor Navarro thanked the Department of Computer Science UCH and the Center for Biotechnology and Bioengineering (CeBiB) for their support, highlighting that the latter has been key over the past decade to the development of his research in this field.
This appointment reflects the impact and trajectory of the researcher’s work, as well as his contribution to the development of a discipline that combines computation, data, and biology. For IMFD, this distinction reaffirms the international standing of one of its researchers and the value of his contribution to data science from an interdisciplinary perspective.
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Sources: DCC Communications, International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB).