Alba Fischer-Carles holds a bachelor’s degree in Physics with a mention in theoretical physics (2020) from the Universitat de Barcelona (UB) and a master’s degree in Atomistic and Multiscale Computational Modelling in Physics, Chemistry and Biochemistry (2021) from the UB and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.

During her academic journey, Alba has participated in several research internships at different outstanding institutions. In 2018, she collaborated with Dr. Guillaume Houzeaux’s research group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, working on predicting particle deposition in the respiratory system. She did her Bachelor’s thesis (2019), based on the study of functional connectivity alterations after focal damage in neuronal cultures, under the supervision of Dr. Jordi Soriano in the Department of Condensed Matter Physics of UB. In 2021, she developed her Master’s thesis on parameter optimization for a force field to describe phase-separation of intrinsically disordered proteins in the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Group at the Institute of Advanced Chemistry of Catalonia – CSIC, supervised by Dr. Ramon Crehuet. Furthermore, from 2019 to 2021, Alba worked with Dr. Juan José Curto at the Ebro Observatory, developing a tool to automatically detect solar flare effects. This research resulted in a co-authored publication, which she presented at the Joint Scientific Assembly IAGA-IASPEI 2021. Additionally, from 2021 to 2022, she participated in automating magnetic coupling calculations and related parameters, such as susceptibility, at the Institute of Theoretical and Computational Chemistry within the Dra. Mercè Deumal and Dr. Jordi Ribas research group.

Alba’s Bachelor’s and Master’s academic training has provided her with a strong foundation in modelling, programming and simulating tools, as well as big data analysis and programming languages like Python. This expertise enabled her to work at Smalle Technologies, where she contributed to several Artificial Intelligence (AI) projects, developing Machine Learning models and working with Deep Learning and Neural Networks (2021-2022). Her experience in AI opened the door for her to join the Oncological Pathology and Bioinformatics Research Group led by Dr. Carlos López Pablo and Dra. Marylène Lejeune at the Hospital de Tortosa Verge de la Cinta (HTVC), Institut d’Investigació Sanitària Pere i Virgili (IISPV) as a research support technician from 2022 to 2023. In this role, she was focused on developing Machine Learning models to predict lymph node metastasis in breast cancer patients.

Alba’s growing interest in cancer research led her to start a PhD in Computational Biology and Biomedical Systems in 2023 at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Thus, she is part of the Biomechanics and Mechanobiology Area of the Barcelona Centre for New Medical Technologies, working within the SIMBIOsys group. Under the guidance of Prof. Gemma Piella Fenoy (UPF), Prof. Jérôme Noailly (UPF) and Dr. Carlos López Pablo (HTVC, IISPV), Alba is currently studying the role of immune cells in the spread of breast cancer cells from the primary tumour to the axillary lymph nodes through Machine Learning and mechanistic modelling approaches.