29/04/2019

Congratulations to Alba Gutiérrez Sacristán for receiving one of the UPF Doctoral School PhD Extraordinary Awards and the International PhD Mention.

During the 2017-2018 academic year, a total of 86 PhD theses were read and 9 of them have been awarded

Congratulations to Alba Gutiérrez Sacristán, doctoral student of the Integrative Biomedical Informatics group of GRIB for her thesis "A bioinformatics approach to the study of comorbidity. Insight into mental disorders", directed by Dr. Laura Inés Furlong. She developed a new bioinformatics approach for the exploitation of information contained in clinical health records as well as the identification of comorbidity patterns. Furthermore, by using automatic text mining tools, this thesis also presented PsyGeNET, a database of psychiatric disorders and their genes developed in collaboration with experts in the field of psychiatry and neurosciences. Psychiatric patients frequently present other comorbid diseases, which affect both treatment options and clinical evolution. In this regard, a tool such as PsyGeNET supports the study of the molecular and cellular mechanisms that underpin psychiatric disease comorbidities, providing new insights into new disease biomarkers and drug targets. This thesis has received one of the UPF Doctoral School PhD Extraordinary Awards and also the International PhD Mention.

Selected publications from the thesis:

1. Gutiérrez-Sacristán A, Grosdidier S, Valverde O, Torrens M, Bravo À, Piñero J, Sanz F, and Furlong LI. PsyGeNET: a knowledge platform on psychiatric disorders and their genes. Bioinformatics, 2015; 31(18): 3075-3077.

2. Gutiérrez-Sacristán A, Bravo À, Giannoula A, Mayer MA, Sanz F, and Furlong LI. comoRbidity: an R package to analyze disease comorbidities. Bioinformatics, 2018; 34(18): 3228-3230.

The PhD Programme in Biomedicine run by the DCEXS currently enrols 456 doctoral students. During the 2017-2018 academic year, a total of 86 PhD theses were read and their corresponding examination committees put 21 of them forward to compete for the PhD Special Awards. The awards ceremony will take place during the 2020 UPF Graduation Ceremony for master's and doctoral degree students.