Héctor García Martín

Divisions

Biological Systems and Engineering

• Process Engineering & Analytics

Secondary Affiliation:

Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology

• Biosystems Data Science

Biography

I was born and raised in the basque city of Bilbao, in northern Spain. From every early on I was fascinated by science and math, so I studied physics for my bachelors, and specialized in solid state physics at the University of the Basque Country. Afterwards, I did my Ph. D. in condensed matter physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Very soon I became fascinated by emergent properties in biology, like e.g. the species area rule. Hence, I decided to work on metagenomics for my postdoc at the Joint Genome Institute, obtaining blueprints of microbial community metabolism. Irked by the difficulty of creating predictive models for microbial communities, I focused on an easier target: pure cultures for which we have the tools to change their genome. This took me to my current position, developing predictive models for biological systems to produce renewable biofuels and other products using synthetic biology. You can read the expanded version of this story here.

Research Interests

My research interests focus on mathematical modeling of biological systems: from synthetic biology, machine learning, systems biology, metabolic flux analysis, data visualization, scientific software development, ecology, to automation and complexity

My research is divided among machine learning, metabolic flux analysis, retrobiosynthesis,  automation and software development for visualization and acquisition of data. I am also using mathematical approaches to try and develop quantitative predictive models for microbial communities. You can find more detailed information on my research interests here and the full story of how a physicist ended up working in biology here.