Profile (CV) of the research teaching staff

Yllanes Mosquera, David
Faculty: Instituto de Biocomputación y Física de Sistemas Complejos

Research Institute: INSTITUTO DE BIOCOMPUTACIÓN Y FÍSICA DE SISTEMAS COMPLEJOS (BIFI)
Academic position: Investigador ARAID
Office phone: 876555410
Email: david.yllanes@bifi.es

University degrees
  • Máster en Física Fundamental. Universidad Complutense de Madrid. 2008
  • Licenciado en Física Especialidad Física Fundamental. Universidad Complutense de Madrid. 2007

PhDs
  • Física. Universidad Complutense de Madrid. 2011

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I work on complex systems at the interface between condensed-matter physics, computer science and biophysics, with applications in advanced materials and in active matter. I approach these problems from the point of view, and with the methods of, statistical field theory: effective models, finite-size scaling, universality or unconventional statistical analyses. I have two decades of experience with large-scale computer simulations and have introduced new Monte Carlo algorithms and advanced parallelised implementations. Many of these tools were developed for classic problems in condensed-matter physics and I am now finding applications for them in newer fields of great practical importance.

My first research project was as a main collaborator in the xAct suite of tensor computer algebra packages, directed by J.M. Martín García, which has now been used by over 1200 works on gravitation. I obtained my PhD at the Univ. Complutense de Madrid, supervised by L. A. Fernández and V. Martín Mayor. My first project was developing Tethered MC, a formalism to explore systems with rugged free-energy landscapes, which we applied to the diluted antiferromagnet in a field, establishing the second-order nature of its phase transition. My PhD thesis was awarded the 2013 Nicholas Metropolis Prize in Computational Physics by the American Physical Society. I also employed the Janus special-purpose computer to perform unprecedentedly long simulations of spin glasses, starting what has been my main research line.

I then joined Giorgio Parisi’s group at La Sapienza in Rome. In this position, I considered spin glasses with an applied magnetic field, finding a glass transition without time-reversal symmetry, thus providing great insight into the glass-transition problem.

As an independent postdoctoral fellow at Syracuse University, I greatly expanded the class of systems under study. I worked on active matter, studying flocking with disorder and the motility-induced phase transition, with applications to the formation of bacterial fruiting bodies. Separately, I studied the effect of geometry and topology on the mechanics of thermalised elastic membranes and the crumpling transition.

In 2018 I accepted a position as staff theoretical scientist at the CZ Biohub, a biomedical research institute associated with Stanford University, UC Berkeley and UCSF. My main goal was the modelling and simulation of subcellular processes and disease progression, in close collaboration with experimental groups. I introduced the concept of ambigrammatic virus and, in general, was able to conduct truly multidisciplinary research in a class of biological problems of real practical relevance.

My track record demonstrates that I have been able to work in very diverse fields with an ever-expanding network of scientists, providing essential expertise to solve hard problems that were new to me but important in their respective fields. The reverse is also true: I have brought new projects (such as genome assembly) to some of my longstanding collaborations.

Since September 2024, I have a permament position as an ARAID Researcher (group leader) at the Instituto de Biocomputación y Física de Sistemas Complejos (BIFI) and the Zaragoza Scientific Center for Advanced Modeling (ZCAM) of the Universidad de Zaragoza, where I am currently the PI in the research grant "From neural networks to proteins: modelling complexity with spin-glass physics".

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