Last September, Javier Buceta has joined the Institute for Integrative Systems Biology I2SysBio (joint center University of Valencia-CSIC) as CSIC tenured scientists and group leader.
Buceta graduated in Physics (M.Sc. Fundamental Physics) in Madrid and also have a M.Sc. degree in Computer Science. After his Ph.D. (2000, Summa Cum Laude and Extraordinary Award: Physics, Madrid), he moved to the University of California San Diego UCSD (Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the Institute for Nonlinear Science) as a postdoc at Prof. Lindenberg’s group. He was later awarded by La Jolla Interfaces in Science/Centre for Theoretical Biological Physics program to conduct research on ‘Left-Right Symmetry Breaking in Embryo Development’ at Salk Institute for Biological Studies/UCSD (J. C. Izpisua-Belmonte and K. Lindenberg). In 2004 he moved to the Barcelona Science Park as a “Ramón y Cajal” fellow and got tenured in 2009. In 2014, he accepted a position as Associate Professor at Lehigh University (Pennsylvania, USA) in the Bioengineering Department and the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, where he was the founding D.T. & W.E. Schiesser Faculty Fellow. In 2019 he got the Excellence in Research Scholarship and Leadership award at Lehigh University and in 2020 he moved back to Spain to the I2SysBio as a group leader and faculty member. Javier Buceta has an extensive publication list, organized both national and international congresses, and in 2011-2013 he was elected as a member of the direction board of the Spanish Physics Royal Society (where he is currently the president of the international chapter).
In his research Buceta uses theoretical, computational, and experimental approaches to address problems of developmental dynamics (e.g. tissue mechanics), microbiology (e.g. growth biomechanics), and ecology (e.g. zoonoses spreading). In all cases the role played by stochasticity is a fundamental component of his work. His research is currently funded by NSF, NIH, and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. Some of Buceta's research has attracted major coverage by public media. One relevant example is his work on the 3D organization of epithelial tissues where a novel geometrical shape (the scutoid) was discovered. This publication is in the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric ever, it is the 2nd most read paper in the area of Life Sciences in 2018 in Nature Communications, and it has been highlighted by The New York Times, New Yorker, and Scientific American among others.
