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, as part of the Chris Quince’s group. You can see my profile here.

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.

Even before, 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 participated in the Nucleate’s PlantHack Hackathon organized by Nucleate UK and ARIA, and our team, SpottEarly, won the first place on the AI Track!.

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.

Upcoming conferences

I’ll be attending the Uncovering Hidden Biology mini-symposium at Worcester College, Oxford on the 18th of September.