Universitat Pompeu Fabra is a public, international and research-intensive university that ranks 10th in the 2020 Times Higher Education Young University Ranking and the 1st of the Spanish Universities in the QS World University ranking 50 under 50 (position 28 worldwide and 7th in Europe). It is the 1st Spanish University (IUNE Report 2019) in yearly scientific output per professor, citations per professor, projects within the Spanish National R&D Plan (per 100 lecturers), in projects within the EU Framework Programme (per 100 lectures). It has about 12,000 enrolled students (nearly 1.300 of them in one of its 9 PhD programmes), 1,500 teaching and research staff, and 700 administrative and service staff. The UPF is strategically located in the PRBB, one of the leading South European biomedical research hubs, that hosts 1300 international staff and scientists, core scientific facilities and multiple research institutes.
The student participating in this project will be enrolled in the PhD studies in BioMedicine and will join the Computational Science Laboratory (lead by Prof. Gianni De Fabritiis) whose interests are the application of computation to solve real world problems, defining intelligence as a form of computation. The research group develops machine learning models with intelligent, useful behavior using reinforcement learning and deep learning, for specific environments. Biomedicine is one environment where physics-based simulations and machine learning to provide novel, innovative approaches. The group leads GPUGRID.net , one of the top distributed computing projects worldwide for running molecular simulations on GPUs and the open platform PlayMolecule.org that has around a thousand registered scientists. The group and its spin-off company Acellera have collaborated with major industries worldwide like Sony, Nvidia, HTC mobile, UCB, Pfizer, Biogen and Novartis.