Ivana Rondon (ESR10)
I am Ivana Rondon from Merida, Venezuela. I graduated in Physics in 2019 from the Universidad de Los Andes in Venezuela. During my bachelors, I was fascinated by quantitative studies in life sciences. Therefore, I joined the group of Chaos and Complex Systems led by Dr. Mario Cosenza, where I had the opportunity to work with Dr. Kay Tucci on a computational modeling project to study the spread of diseases in community networks.
In 2020, I moved to Trieste, Italy, to study for 1 year in the fully funded Quantitative Life Sciences Postgraduate Diploma Programme at the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP). The international experience and the quality of the courses greatly contributed to my motivation to work in scientific research. By the last period of the Diploma Programme, I carried out a project within the ICTP Quantitative Ecology and Evolution group, supervised by Dr. Jacopo Grilli, which focused on the study of cell size control in bacteria E. coli under non-stationary conditions.
In September 2021, I enrolled in the Master 2 of Systems and Synthetic Biology at the Université Paris-Saclay/Université d’Évry in France after receiving a Scholarship from the IDEX International Master Program. I did a 6-month internship under the supervision of Dr. Olivier Martin within the REGARN team at the Institute of Plant Sciences of Paris-Saclay, where I learned mathematical and computational techniques to infer gene regulatory networks from transcriptomics time-series data.
In July 2022, deeply interested in studying cancer computational biology, I joined the Cancer Cell Signaling And Metabolism Lab inside the CIC bioGUNE, Bilbao, Spain, as a doctoral student with a Marie Curie Fellowship for the project “(poly)Genic alterations which emerge from monogenic PTEN-loss driven prostate cancer” supervised by Dr. Arkaitz Carracedo and Isabel Mendizabal.