About me
Hi, I’m Ricardo, and I’m a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at the Earlham Institute, 🇬🇧. My current research focuses on mathematical modelling of the microbiome and metabolism. Before my postdoc, I completed my PhD at the IQB3, School of Biological Sciences, University of Edinburgh, 🇬🇧. My PhD project involved building a prototype of an automated biochemist by combining AI/ML for iterative experimentation, metabolomics, robotics, and automation. My supervisors were Karl Burgess and Diego Oyarzún. Before my PhD, I was a research assistant at the Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María in Valparaíso, Chile, helping in general bioinformatics, bacterial genomics and natural product discovery in the phylum Actinomycetota. I got my (6-year) bachelor degree at the same university on the topic of Environmental Engineering. My home town is Villa Alemana, 🇨🇱.
Recent news
I’ve attended the Faraday Discussion on Data-driven discovery in the chemical sciences at Trinity College, Oxford (10-12 September 2024). The conference was organised by Fernanda Duarte (Oxford) and Volker Deringer (Oxford), who did a tremendous job over the event. Loved the format and how the discussions organise around the preprints. Very energising inaugural talk by Alán Aspuru-Guzik on the frontiers of automation for chemistry. Great talks and posters around and nice final talk from Andy Cooper, showing a hypothesis-driven Bayesian optimisation pipeline (in picture). More information here. 
I participated in the Cambridge Ellis Unit Summer School in Probabilistic Machine Learning from 15 July to 19 July 2024, organised by the Department of Computer Science at the University of Cambridge. 5 days packed with a broad range of topics including basic probablistic models, good practices at modelling, reinforcement learning, transformer theory, causal modelling, Monte-Carlo methods and more. Many thanks to the amazing organizers, speakers and the summer school attendants, who were kind to share new ideas in probabilistic learning. Some of the slides from the sessions are here.
I attended on Monday 22 of May 2024 the Paris OECD Global Forum on Technology: Building Biofutures. Great room for the discussion of the impacts of synthetic biology in national economies, and how platform investment and bio security training are essential to deliver solutions faster. Chile 🇨🇱 needs a synthetic biology roadmap if it wants to be a leader in the global market.