Inmaculada Arostegui
Full Professor, Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (UPV/EHU)
BIOSTATNET node: País Vasco
Research group: BIOSTIT (Grupo de Investigación en Bioestadística, UPV/EHU)
She holds a degree in Mathematics from the UPV/EHU, a Master of Health Science in Biostatistics from Johns Hopkins University (1996) and a PhD from the UPV/EHU (2007). She is a Full Professor in the Departamento de Matemática Aplicada, Estadística e Investigación Operativa at the UPV/EHU, a research collaborator at the Basque Center for Applied Mathematics (BCAM), and leads the BIOSTIT research group. She also works as a statistical advisor for the Hospital de Galdakao (Osakidetza). Her research focuses on the development and validation of prediction models, the modelling of patient-reported outcomes (such as health-related quality of life), longitudinal data analysis and risk stratification.
Anabel Blasco
Servei d’Estadística Aplicada
Adjunct Professor, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)
BIOSTATNET node: Catalunya – SEA
She is a statistician at the Servei d’Estadística Aplicada of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where she also teaches Design of Experiments on the Grau en Estadística Aplicada. Her research focuses on modelling count data, particularly how to handle zeros: distinguishing false, structural and random zeros and choosing the right statistical model for each case. With Pedro Puig and Marta Pérez-Casany, she co-authored a widely cited paper on this topic in Methods in Ecology and Evolution (2019). She has also worked on methods for estimating population size in capture-recapture experiments and collaborates with research teams in ecology, veterinary science and food science.
Maria Lorena Correa Abendaño
Predoctoral Researcher, Institut de Recerca i Tecnologia Agroalimentàries (IRTA) – Centre de Recerca en Sanitat Animal (CReSA), Institut de Recerca i Tecnologia Agroalimentàries
BIOSTATNET node: Catalunya – SEA
She is a predoctoral researcher in epidemiology in the Programa de Sanitat Animal of IRTA, at the Centre de Recerca en Sanitat Animal (CReSA), located on the campus of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Her research focuses on applying statistical methods to epidemiological surveillance in animal health, in particular the use of hidden Markov models for the surveillance of Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome (PRRS), one of the diseases with the greatest economic impact on pig production.
Jaione Etxeberria
Associate Professor, Universidad Pública de Navarra (UPNA)
BIOSTATNET node: Navarra Spatial Statistics
Research group: Estadística Espacial (UPNA)
She is an Associate Professor in the Departamento de Estadística, Informática y Matemáticas at the UPNA and a member of the Institute for Advanced Materials and Mathematics (INAMAT2). She received her PhD from the UPNA in 2012 with a thesis on space-time disease mapping modelling and forecasting, supervised by María Dolores Ugarte and Tomás Goicoa. Her research focuses on disease mapping and spatio-temporal models in epidemiology, particularly cancer incidence forecasting. She has supervised doctoral theses in this field.
Guadalupe Gómez Melis
Full Professor, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
BIOSTATNET node: Catalunya – BIO
Research group: GRBIO (Grup de Recerca en Bioestadística i Bioinformàtica, UPC)
She graduated in Mathematics from the Universitat de Barcelona and received her PhD in Statistics from Columbia University, New York (1986). After a period as Assistant Professor at Ohio State University, she joined the Departament d’Estadística i Investigació Operativa at the UPC, where she has been a Full Professor since 2005. She has been a visiting scientist at Harvard University, the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit (Vietnam) and the MD Anderson Cancer Center (Texas). She leads the GRBIO research group and was a funder co-PI of BIOSTATNET. She has served as President of the Consell Català d’Estadística, the Societat Catalana d’Estadística and the Spanish Region of the International Biometric Society (IBS), where she now serves as a director on the Executive Board. Her research focuses on survival analysis, clinical trials and data with complex censoring patterns.
María P. Pata
Biostatistician, Biostatech Advice, Training and Innovation in Biostatistics, S.L.
BIOSTATNET node: Galicia
She works at Biostatech, a technology-based company in biostatistics and applied statistics founded in 2012 and recognised as the best technology spin-off of the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela in 2022. Based in Ames (A Coruña), Biostatech supports researchers and companies in the Life and Health Sciences at every stage of a study, from optimal experimental design to data processing and analysis.
Nuria Pérez Álvarez
Assistant Professor, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
BIOSTATNET node: Catalunya – BIO
Research group: GRBIO (Grup de Recerca en Bioestadística i Bioinformàtica, UPC)
She is a biostatistician with more than 20 years of experience at research institutions including the Institut de Recerca de l’Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau, the Fundació de Lluita contra la Sida, and IMIM. She received her PhD from UPC in 2014 with a thesis on economic evaluation in health research. She is a member of the Research Group in Biostatistics and Bioinformatics (GRBio) and the Research and Innovation in Health Institute (IRIS). Author of 109 publications resulting from applied research in medicine, her work spans infectious diseases (mainly HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, COVID-19), kidney and cardiovascular diseases, osteoporosis, and knee osteoarthritis. She specialises in the design, analysis, and interpretation of clinical studies, with particular attention to longitudinal, high-dimensional, and missing data. She is actively involved in outreach activities and professional service, serving as a board member of the Societat Catalana d’Estadística (2016–2025), Social Media Officer for the International Biometric Society (2022–2024), and Country Representative for the Caucus for Women in Statistics and Data Science (2024–).
Gema Pigueiras Voces
Associate Professor, Universidad de Cádiz
BIOSTATNET node: Andalucía Occidental
She holds a degree in Mathematics from the Universidad de Cádiz (2010) and a PhD from the Programa de Doctorado Interuniversitario en Matemáticas (2019), with an internationally recognised thesis on premium principles and inequality measures based on mixtures of order statistics. She is an Associate Professor in the Departamento de Estadística e Investigación Operativa at the Facultad de Ciencias of the Universidad de Cádiz. Her research lies in actuarial science, with a particular interest in stochastic orders, risk measures and inequality measures.
Andrea Ruiz Vega
PhD Researcher, Universidad de Granada
BIOSTATNET node: Granada
She is a Substitute Lecturer at the Universidad de Granada, where she is also completing her PhD under the supervision of Miguel Ángel Montero-Alonso and Juan de Dios Luna. Her research focuses on mixture distribution models (normal and skew-normal) applied to the age distribution of suicide mortality, with applications to several Spanish regions. She has presented this work at BIOSTATNET meetings, the Sociedad Española de Biometría and international conferences.
María Sánchez Martín
Researcher, Instituto de Investigación Biomédica de Salamanca (IBSAL)
BIOSTATNET node: DoE+Bioinformática
She is a researcher at the Instituto de Investigación Biomédica de Salamanca (IBSAL), a translational research centre established by the Junta de Castilla y León and the Universidad de Salamanca. She is part of BIOSTATNET’s Design of Experiments and Bioinformatics node, which works on the optimal design of studies and the statistical analysis of biomedical and omics data.
Blanca Sarzo
Postdoctoral Researcher (Sara Borrell contract), Fundació per al Foment de la Investigació Sanitària i Biomèdica de la Comunitat Valenciana (FISABIO)
BIOSTATNET node: Valencia – VABAR
