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

Download curriculum in PDF format

 
             
I am a statistical and computational physicist, working 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 1300 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 Monte Carlo, 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. My main research focus has been on spin glasses. During my PhD we employed the Janus special-purpose computer to perform unprecedentedly long simulations and were able to establish the nature of the spin-glass phase for experimental scales. 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 —establishing that a tiny fraction of dissenters can break a flock— and characterising the physical properties of the motility-induced phase transition. I showed that a minimal model of active colloids can explain the formation of fruiting bodies in myxobacteria, one of the first biological applications of these systems. Separately, I studied the effect of geometry and topology on the physics of thermalised elastic membranes and the crumpling transition, demonstrating the potential of graphene to design mechanic metamaterials.

In 2018 I moved to CZ Biohub, a biological research institute associated with Stanford University, UC Berkeley and UCSF, where I was a staff theoretical scientist. My main goal was the modelling and simulation of intracellular processes and disease progression, in close collaboration with experimental groups, as well as the development of advanced methods for optimisation problems in genome assembly and epidemiology (such as reconstructing phylogenetic trees).

Since September 2024, I have a permament position as an ARAID Researcher 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 the IP of the national grant "From Neural Networks to Proteins: Modelling Complexity with Spin-Glass Physics".

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