Lucia Prieto Santamaria

• Name: Lucia
• Surname: Prieto Santamaria
• Affiliation/Institution: University Politécnica de Madrid
• Last roles in CBMS: PC Chair 2024
• Bio:

Lucía Prieto Santamaría is an Assistant Professor at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM). From July 2023 to August 2024, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Medical Data Analytics Laboratory (MEDAL) located at the Center for Biomedical Technology (CTB) of the UPM. She holds a Ph.D. in Software, Systems and Computing (2023), a Master’s degree in Computational Biology (2019) and a Bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology (2018).
Her research areas and expertise include medical knowledge representation, biomedical informatics, network medicine and health-related social media analysis, with a central role for applied semantic technologies and machine learning techniques. In recent years, she has been involved in several national and international research projects, and has authored and co-authored over 16 JCR-indexed scientific journal articles and up to 15 conference papers. Moreover, Lucía serves as a reviewer for multiple scientific journals and conferences in the field of medical informatics and computational biology.
As part of her doctoral thesis, she studied the new horizons of drug repurposing and disease understanding through large-scale data analysis, being awarded with Premio Francisco Del Pozo to the best doctoral thesis defended at the CTB in 2023. From January to June 2023, she carried out a research stay at the laboratory of Professor Albert-László Barabási (Northeastern University, Boston, USA).
She has been involved in teaching subjects related to databases and data analysis, with a focus on their applications in the biomedical sciences, and she has also mentored multiple undergraduate and master students.
In 2024, she participated as one of the Programme Committee Chair in the IEEE 37th International Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems (CBMS). Lucía was also an active Programme Committee member during the past editions of the venue (2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023) and presented several works at the conference along the years. In 2024, she coauthored the work “Exploring Drug Repurposing Opportunities for Schizophrenia: A Network Medicine Approach”, which received the Best Paper Award.