J. Alberto Conejero Casares

I am J. Alberto Conejero, Full Professor of Applied Mathematics at the School of Computer Science (ETSINF), Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), and a researcher at the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics (IUMPA). I currently serve as Vice-Rector for Students and Entrepreneurship, having previously directed the Department of Applied Mathematics (2016–2023) and the MSc in Mathematical Research at UPV (2016–2023).

I hold a BSc and MSc in Mathematics from the Universitat de València (1998), a PhD in Applied Mathematics from UPV (2004), an Outstanding Dissertation Award, and, more recently, an MSc in Bioinformatics and Biostatistics from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and the Universitat de Barcelona (2020). My early work was in operator theory and dynamical systems: the kind of mathematics that studies how transformations act on infinite-dimensional spaces, and, surprisingly often, how perfectly linear systems can produce chaos.

Over the last decade, my research has shifted toward the physical and biological systems that those objects describe. I became fascinated by anomalous diffusion: the way molecules, proteins and cells move when the classical laws of Brownian motion stop holding. With colleagues across the world, I took part in the AnDi Challenges, a community benchmark for decoding diffusion from single-particle trajectories, obtaining outstanding results in both editions.

In parallel, I work on graph theory, on networks of cars, of people, of diseases, and on the artificial intelligence we use to read all of it. In 2021 I co-led the Valencia IA4COVID team with Nuria Oliver, which won the $500,000 XPRIZE Pandemic Response Challenge for models that helped governments balance pandemic interventions against economic and social cost.

I have published more than 160 papers across mathematics, physics, biomedicine, and computer science, with more than 3,200 citations on Google Scholar. Alongside research, teaching has been a constant across these 25 years: from Algebra and Mathematical Analysis to Graph Theory, Network Science, and Data Science Projects, plus occasional forays into Synthetic Biology, Soft Skills, and Art and Science. I have two MOOCs on edX and Coursera. In 2014, I was recognized with the Excellence Teaching Prize from the UPV Social Council.

But beyond classrooms, teaching keeps going. From 2014 to 2018, I was one of the instructors of the iGEM UPV_Valencia teams, which won the Undergraduate Grand Prize at the international synthetic biology iGEM competition. Now, as Vice-Rector, I am responsible for the Generación Espontánea (Design Factory) program at UPV, where students participate in challenges and competitions and develop their own extra-academic projects. I am also responsible for fostering entrepreneurship among students through the IDEAS UPV service and the Cátedra ValenT-IA with the València City Council, enabling them to create their own companies.