User:Txomsy

José R. Valverde
Known since ancient times wink as JR or just j, José R. Valverde has a PhD in Medicine and Surgery by the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (www.uam.es), but has been working on Information Technologies and on Bioinformatics since he started his master thesis (1984). By the way, the master thesis dealed with the Molecular Biology of aging and the PhD thesis with the sequencing and analysis of the mitochondrial genome of Artemia franciscana and both where carried out at the Department of Biochemistry of Univ. Autónoma de Madrid and Instituto de Enzimología del CSIC (which later on would become the Instituto de Investigaciones Biomédicas). Other work areas related with Life Sciences include his participation in the first Human In Vitro Fertilization and Embryo Transfer program of Spain, forensics medicine, developmental biology or exobiology (for the European Space Agency).

Officially, JR worked as Head of the Service of Bioinformatics at Instituto de Investigaciones Biomédicas (www.iib.uam.es) of CSIC (1991), then moved on to the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) (www.ebi.ac.uk) during its creation (1994) and currently works as Head of Services in the Higher Body of Systems and Information Technologies of the State's Administration (www.astic.es) at the Centro Nacional de Biotecnología, CSIC (National Biotechnology Center). In addition he has collaborated in many training initiatives at the postgraduate level with various entities (public, academic and private) since 1987 (both at the masters degree, PhD and post-doc levels).

JR is the technical manager of the Spanish EMBnet node (www.es.embnet.org) since 1995. EMBnet (www.embnet.org), the European Molecular Biology Network was launched in 1989 as a network of loosely coupled national nodes of excellence in Bioinformatics with the aim of providing services on Bioinformatics for the national and international scientific community. Nowadays EMBnet groups together more than 40 nodes and extends beyond Europe to reach all of the World.

Cuurently, JR is Head of the Scientific Computing Service at Centro Nacional de Biotecnología (National Biotechnology Center, www.cnb.csic.es) of Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Spanish Research Council, www.csic.es), in Madrid, Spain since 1995.

In addition to providing access to a large number of databases and Bioinformatics software packages, the Scientific Computing Service is actively developing new scientific services for the Community.

With the goal of providing high quality services, JR has been always involved in pilot and production projects in High Performance Computing and Communications such as:


 * Deployment of network services like Ethernet (1986), AppleTalk (1987), BITnet (1987), DECnet (1988), Internet(1990), etc...
 * Pilot implementation of services like access to biomedical databases (1987), e-mail (1988), ftp (1990), gopher (1990), web (1992), synchronization (1994), security (1994), certification, etc...
 * Deployment of cluster environments on VMS (1988), UNIX (1994), Beowulf (1995), Sprite (1995), Mosix (1997), etc...
 * HPC environments like Cray (1987), MasPar (1994), Distributed computing (1995), Grid (1999), etc...

Our most recent work has centered since 1999 on planning, development and deployment of massively distributed infrastructures (Grid) for Bioinformatics and Biocomputing. We have been participating in the EGEE project (Enabling Grids for E-SciencE) since its early planning stages; EGEE aims to build and maintain the scientific computing Grid for Europe, and we have been involved as developers of applications in the BiomedVirtual Organization.