Santiago Elena

Santiago F. Elena is CSIC professor and head of the Evolutionary Systems Virology group at the Institute for Integrative Systems Biology (I²SysBio). In addition, he is an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute (NM, USA) and a member of the European Virus Bioinformatics Center (University of Jena, Germany). He graduated in Biochemistry, with a PGCert in Bioinformatics, and did a PhD thesis on Evolutionary Genetics of RNA viruses, all at the University of Valencia. His work has always focused on the study of the mechanisms by which RNA viruses adapt to their hosts and how this adaptation results in the manipulation of cellular resources for their own benefit. For this work, he combines experimental evolution, molecular biology and omics, computational systems biology, molecular epidemiology, and mathematical modeling. Among other merits, he is an elected member of the European Organization for Molecular Biology (EMBO), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academia Europaea, the European Academy of Microbiology, and the American Academy of Microbiology. He has published more than 320 papers, with ~23,000 citations and an h index of 76.