Dr Catalina Vallejos leads the Biomedical Data Science research group at the MRC Human Genetics Unit within the University of Edinburgh. She is also a co-Director for the Edinburgh Cross-Disciplinary Fellowships programme. She is an alumnus of The Alan Turing Institute, where she was part of the inaugural cohort of Research Fellows before becoming a Turing Fellow. Catalina completed a PhD in Statistics at the University of Warwick and post-doctoral training in a joint appointment between the MRC Biostatistics Unit and the EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge.
Catalina leads a cross-disciplinary research programme at the intersection between statistics, machine learning and biomedicine: addressing complex biomedical questions and technologies whilst developing new computational methods and open-source software. Her work covers a wide range of application areas and data types: from helping to improve our understanding of complex biological processes (such as aging) using single cell sequencing data to translational projects, developing clinical risk prediction tools using routinely collected electronic health records.