Marta Casanellas is a full professor in the Department of Mathematics at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) and a researcher at the Centre de Recerca Matemàtica. She teaches at the Faculty of Mathematics and Statistics, ETSEIB, and FIB. She earned her PhD in mathematics from the University of Barcelona under RM Miró-Roig, focusing on algebraic geometry and liaison theory. After completing a postdoc at UC Berkeley with a Fulbright Scholarship, she shifted her research to applications of algebraic geometry in computational biology, particularly phylogenetics. Her educational background includes a PhD from the University of Barcelona (2002), followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley (2002-2003) supported by a Fulbright Scholarship. She obtained a prestigious Ramón y Cajal contract at UPC in 2003, which marked her transition to interdisciplinary research at the intersection of mathematics and biology. Casanellas' research focuses on applying algebraic and geometric techniques to phylogenetics, with particular emphasis on evolutionary models, phylogenetic invariants, and computational methods for genomic data analysis. Her work bridges pure mathematics (particularly algebraic geometry) with biological applications, developing mathematical frameworks to reconstruct evolutionary histories and understand genomic relationships. She has published extensively in both mathematics journals like Advances in Mathematics and biology journals like Molecular Biology and Evolution. Her recent publications demonstrate a consistent focus on developing algebraic methods for phylogenetic analysis, with increasing attention to heterogeneous evolutionary processes across lineages, time-reversible models, and computational implementations of theoretical results. The trend shows progression from theoretical foundations in algebraic geometry toward increasingly sophisticated and applicable computational methods for biological data. Fulbright Scholarship for postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley Ramón y Cajal contract (2003) Casanellas has supervised PhD students including A. Kedzierska (co-supervised with R. Guigó of the CRG). She has served as principal investigator for three competitive Spanish government projects involving fifteen researchers each. She has held significant academic leadership roles including Deputy Director of Research of the Department of Mathematics at UPC (2015-2018), head of studies for the Degree in Data Science and Engineering at UPC (2018-2022), and currently coordinates UPC's PhD in Bioinformatics program and Bachelor's Degree in Bioinformatics. She leads the BIO-GEOMAP research group focused on applying mathematical techniques to biological problems.
