Our Team

Alejandro Fontal is currently a postdoctoral researcher at ISGlobal, specializing in the application of data science to bioinformatics, epidemiology, and computational biomedicine. His research focuses on understanding the environmental drivers of disease, with a particular emphasis on Kawasaki Disease, a pediatric vasculitis of unknown etiology. Using methodologies such as time series analysis, GIS, and metagenomic sequencing, he investigates the complex interplay between environmental factors and disease onset.

Alejandro earned his PhD in Biotechnology from the University of Barcelona, conducting his doctoral research at ISGlobal under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions-funded HELICAL project. He also holds an MSc in Bioinformatics with a specialization in Data Science from Wageningen University & Research, and a BSc in Molecular Biotechnology from the University of Barcelona.

Beyond academia, Alejandro has experience designing and implementing online courses on the EdX platform for Wageningen University's Educational Staff Development department. He also worked as a Data Scientist in the R&D division of Dupont Nutrition & Biosciences in the Netherlands, where he applied machine learning to optimize protein engineering workflows, accelerating the development of both novel and enhanced industrial enzymes.

Committed to open science and reproducible research, Alejandro builds interactive tools and dashboards using open-source programming frameworks to support real-time data visualization, automated analysis, and reproducible pipelines. His work emphasizes scalable, transparent code and aims to translate complex datasets into actionable insights for public health decision-making.