Juan A. Botía

Juan A. Botía, is Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at University of Murcia (UMU), Spain since September 2018. He also holds a Honorary Senior Research Fellow position at the Institute of Neurology (IoN), University College London (UCL), UK since July, 2017. He obtained the PhD degree in Computational Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI) from UMU (March, 2002). Dr. Botía is a member of the Spanish Association for Artificial Intelligence (AEPIA). Dr. Botía has 4 research periods recognised by the Spanish Bureau of Science. He has more than 90 papers in JCR and 45 in Q1. His Google Scholar h index is 38 with 5560 citations since 2020. The researcher currently leads a national project investigating the detection and characterization of concept drift in machine learning, is member of a research project in collaboration with UCL and King´s College London, funded by the Michael J. Fox Foundation, to research on biomarkers for early diagnosis in Parkinson Disease using machine learning and a number of private contracts with companies, including research on peptides with antimicrobial properties based on deep learning approaches. He is very active in terms of technology transfer. In the last five years he has lead a contract to develop an AI-based system for assisting clinicians in genetic diagnostic for the NIMGenetics company and has worked for the Verge Start up based in California, USA to develop explainable machine learning models for neurodegenerative diseases. He has contributed to the registration of several intellectual properties and played a founding role in the AMI2 startup. During the last decade, the research of Dr. Botía has been focused on the development of algorithms and pipelines for the analysis of omics data mainly with machine learning techniques. He has developed specific algorithms for co-expression networks, as in the papers PMID 39030261, 33734320, 28403906), SNP epistasis (PMID 39657708) for Parkinson’s disease and classifiers for Alzheimer ́s and Parkinson ́s diseases to distinguish between cases and control individuals mainly based on omics (PMID 39557914, 38089583, 38761503). His research interest is on the development of data analysis techniques and tools for modelling disease from an omics and clinical data perspective specifically for neurodegenerative disorders. Dr. Botía has supervised 12 finished PhD Theses and is currently supervising 5 new PhD theses all focused on the development of specific data analysis algorithms for biological data, specially AI based approaches. Relevant GitHub project he is coordinating are as follows https://github.com/alexcis95/PhenoExam https://github.com/aliciagp/TGCN https://github.com/aliciagp/scCoExpNets https://github.com/juanbot/CoExpNets At the university, Dr. Botía coordinates various subjects related with machine learning and deep learning in a number of Master and Grade level studies at Universidad de Murcia, including a MSc in Bioinformatics, an MSc in Artificial Intelligence and a MSc in Big Data. In particular he teaches Deep Learning architectures within the Data Science and Engineering BSc and Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing in the Master in AI. He is also the general coordinator of the BSc studies in Data Science and Engineering at the same University.