Nieves Vélez de Mendizábal Castillo

Nieves Vélez de Mendizábal joined the Computational Biology Initiative for half a year in 2007, as a visiting researcher with financial support from the Basque Country Government. Nieves earned her Masters in Computer Science from the University of the Basque Country (Spain) in 2003 and is expected to finish her PhD at the Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence -University of the Basque Country at September 2009.

Right now she is working in the Neuroscience Department at the Center for Applied Medical Research (University of Navarra). Her research has been focused on the computational modeling of problems linked to both immunology and neurology. Recent advances in molecular and cellular biology insights about the nature of neurological and immunological diseases. However, a comprehensive understanding of their pathogenesis is still lacking. Although reductionism has been successful in enumerating and characterizing the components of most living organisms, it has failed to generate knowledge on how these components interact in complex arrangements to allow and sustain two of the most fundamental properties of the organism as a whole: its fitness, also termed its robustness, and its capacity to evolve. The mathematical and computational biology complements the classic reductionist approaches in the biomedical sciences by enabling integration of available molecular, physiological, and clinical information in the context of a quantitative framework typically used by engineers. Nieves and her colleagues employ tools developed in physics and mathematics such as nonlinear dynamics, control theory, and systems dynamics. The main goal is to solve questions related to the complexity of living systems such as the immune system, which cannot be reconciled solely with the currently available tools of molecular biology.