Javier Buceta - Photo: Lehigh University

Last September, Javier Buceta has joined the Institute of Integrative Systems Biology I2SysBio (joint Universitat de València-CSIC center) as senior scientist and group leader of the CSIC.

Buceta has a degree in Physics (M.Sc. Fundamental Physics) in Madrid and also has an M.Sc. in Computer Science. After his PhD (2000, Cum Laude and Extraordinary Prize: Physics, Madrid), he moved to the University of California San Diego UCSD (Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the Institute of Nonlinear Sciences) as a postdoc in Professor Lindenberg's group. He was later awarded by the Interfaces in Science program/La Jolla Center for Theoretical Biological Physics to conduct research on "The breaking of left-right symmetry in embryo development" at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies/UCSD (J. C. Izpisua-Belmonte and K. Lindenberg). In 2004 he moved to the Barcelona Science Park as a "Ramón y Cajal" scientist and in 2009 he obtained tenure. In 2014, he accepted a full professor position at Lehigh University (Pennsylvania, USA) in the Department of Bioengineering and the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, where he was the founder of D.T. & W.E. Schiesser Faculty Fellow. In 2019 he obtained the Research Excellence Scholarship and the Leadership award from Lehigh University and in 2020 he returned to Spain to I2SysBio as a group leader and member of the Scientific Faculty. Javier Buceta has an extensive list of publications, has organized national and international conferences, and in 2011-2013 was elected to the board of directors of the Royal Spanish Society of Physics (where he is currently president of the international chapter).

In his research Buceta uses theoretical, computational and experimental approaches to address problems in developmental dynamics (e.g. tissue mechanics), microbiology (e.g. growth biomechanics) and ecology (e.g. the spread of zoonoses). In all cases, the role played by stochastic phenomena is a fundamental component of their work. His research is currently funded by the NSF, the NIH, and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. Some of Buceta's investigations have been widely covered by public media. A relevant example is his work on the three-dimensional organization of epithelial tissues, where a new geometric shape (the scutoid) was discovered. This publication is in the top 5% of all research results scored by Altmetric, is the second most read article in the area of ​​life sciences in 2018 in Nature Communications, and has been highlighted by The New York Times, New Yorker and Scientific American among others.

• TheSimBioSys - Buceta's Lab