English (United Kingdom) 
Español (España) 
Dr. Ángel Goñi-Moreno joins the new CBGP Synthetic Biology and Bioengineering program, and establishes the Biocomputation Lab. He comes from Newcastle University (UK), where he has been Principal Investigator since 2016. Previous to this, Dr. Goñi-Moreno spend 6 years of postdoctoral experience in Manchester Metropolitan University (UK) and the National Centre for Biotechnology CNB-CSIC (Spain). His work sits at the interface of computing and biology, aiming at engineering biological systems with human-defined information processing abilities.
Dr. Goñi-Moreno’s research revolves around the understanding of how information is processed in living cells, and the rational modification of information flows to engineer novel biocomputations. To this end, he combines the use of mathematical modelling, computing simulations and in-vivo experiments. Major topics he has contributed to range from the engineering of genetic Boolean functions and the analysis of multicellular distributed computations, to the development of biophysical models of gene regulation and the production of standards for synthetic biology research.
Dr. Goñi-Moreno earned his PhD at the Technical University of Madrid (UPM) in 2010. His PhD work takes concepts from theoretical computer science for the design of multicellular systems with distributed computations. For his first post-doc, he joined an EU project on biocomputing led by Prof Martyn Amos (MMU, UK). An important output from this period is the analysis of horizontal gene transfer as an alternative communication protocol to quorum sensing in multicellular consortia. For his second post-doc, he joined the laboratory of Prof Victor de Lorenzo (CNB-CSIC, Spain), where he led studies of gene expression noise, focussing on the information capacity of such signals and the in-vivo programmability of noise patters. In 2016 he was awarded with a tenured lectureship at Newcastle University (UK), joining the Interdisciplinary Computing and Complex Biosystems (ICOS) research group. As a Principal Investigator, he led an inter-disciplinary team that carried out research at the interface of computing and biology, both theoretical and experimental. Recent work from this period include the development of new mathematical models of gene regulation for bio-circuit design, the engineering of bacterial-based logic gates and the development of standards (i.e., SBOL, SEVA) for synthetic biology. Dr. Goñi-Moreno has trained the next generation of scientists through the MSc in Synthetic Biology of Newcastle University, and supervised award-winning International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition (iGEM) teams.
From September 2020, he will join the CBGP as Group Leader, after being awarded a Fellowship by the Region of Madrid (CAM) as a result of a highly competitive process. In the coming years, he will aim at advancing our understanding of information-processing mechanisms in living systems, as well as engineering bio-computations beyond Boolean circuits—even surpassing the computational power of traditional silicon-based machines in many areas.
