Biography:

MCP holds a PhD in Physics from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (2001), although he has developed almost all his career at the Universidad Pontificia Comillas. Member of the Interdisciplinary Group of Complex Systems (GISC). He has been the Principal Investigator of 5 Spanish Ministry of Science research projects. He has participated in 10 projects, including 3 European projects within the framework of Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (of which he has been the IP of the Comillas node) and H2020. These projects' central theme was applying Statistical Mechanics methods to model complex systems, with particular emphasis on modelling and predicting experimental data. MCP's primary research approach translates analytical and computational methods into actual experiments. In this sense, most of the research carried out by the MCP has been carried out in collaboration with experimental groups from all over the world, from Immunology (B. Alarcón CBMSO-CSIC; S. Mañes, CNB-CSIC; J. Rodríguez-Manzaneque, U. de Granada...) to Condensed Matter (L. Vázquez, ICMM-CSIC; A. Hernández, UB). MCP has been a visiting researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and has completed a sabbatical stay at the University of Leeds (2016-2017), of which he is currently Visiting Professor.

Areas of interest:

Statistical Mechanics, Nonlinear Physics, Theoretical Immunology, Bayesian Statistics and Epidemiology, Forest fires.

Experience:

He has published in journals such as PNAS, Physical Review Letters, Nature Communications, Science Translational Medicine, Physical Review B, Scientific Reports and Frontiers in Immunology, to name a few. He has been the Principal Investigator of 5 Spanish Ministry of Science research projects. He has participated in 10 projects, including 3 European projects within Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (of which he has been the IP of the Comillas node) and H2020. The central theme of these projects was the application of Statistical Mechanics methods to model complex systems, with particular emphasis on modelling and predicting experimental data. Since 2009, all MCP projects have focused on biophysics and theoretical immunology, with 89 publications in peer-reviewed journals with about 2000 citations. MCP's research has been reviewed in various media (BBC Radio 4, RNE-Radio 1, El País, Muy Interesante, and other Spanish newspapers).

Skills:

MCP's analytical skills include agent-based simulations, stochastic equations, reaction-diffusion equations with a strong emphasis on perturbation and numerical methods. MCP is also an experienced programmer in different programming paradigms, and program knows fluently in (i) General-purpose languages: Python, C, C++, Java; (ii) Scripting languages: Matlab, bash, awk; (iii) Statistical and Bayesian languages: R, JAGS, BUGS; and (iv) Symbolic software: Mathematica, Maple.

Current research interests:

Epidemic models; Probabilistic Machine Learning; Theoretical Immunology; Biophysics; Stochastic Processes; Serious Games.