Enrique Carrillo de Santa Pau

Dr. Enrique Carrillo de Santa Pau has been the principal investigator of the bioinformatics and computational biology research line at the IMDEA Food Research Institute since April 2018, and holds a favourable R3 certificate (CR32024-047843, 2024 call). Within this line of work he directly supervises 2 postdoctoral researchers, one IMDEA staff member and one with an MSCA "Postdoctoral Fellowship 2022" contract (ref. 101105645), 1 FPU predoctoral researcher (FPU22/04053), 1 CAM research assistant (PEJ-2024-AI/COM-32727) and 3 technicians of the INVESTIGO programme (ref. 09-PIN1-00014.8/2024). In addition, Dr. Carrillo has been associate professor in the Department of Biochemistry of the Faculty of Medicine of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid since 2018, and collaborator of the research group associated with the Health Research Institute of the Hospital Universitario La Paz (IdiPAZ): Frailty, multimorbidity patterns and mortality in the community-dwelling elderly population. He has also been training board member (vocal de formación) of the Spanish Society of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (SEBiBC) since 2021. He is also a founding partner of the IMDEA Food spin-off Microsei Biotech SL, constituted on 19/12/2024.
His training includes a degree in Biology (2002) from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM), a PhD in Molecular Biology (2007) and a master's degree in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (2010), both from the UCM, a master's degree in Current Techniques of Applied Statistics (2014) from the UNED, and a specialised course in technology transfer from the IE Business School (2017). Previously, Dr. Carrillo has worked in research centres of excellence such as the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), the Nijmegen Centre for Molecular Life Sciences (The Netherlands), the Hospital Ramón y Cajal, and in Primary Care of the Madrid Health Service. This has allowed him to acquire a very complete experience in molecular biology, bioinformatics, epidemiology and clinical research, working with leaders in these fields such as Dr. Alfonso Valencia (bioinformatics), Dr. Francisco X. Real (molecular pathophysiology of cancer), Dr. Henk Stunnenberg (epigenomics) and Dr. Miguel Ángel Salinero (clinical epidemiology).
Over all these years he has participated in different competitive national and international projects in FP7 and H2020, notably FNS-Cloud (€10M), BLUEPRINT (€30M), CANCERDIP (€3.9M), CANCERALIA (€4.1M) and ONCONET SUDOE (€2.3M), together with projects of the Ministry of Science and Innovation, the Ministry of Health and Consumer Affairs, and other institutions. He has also organised several R&D activities sponsored by the Fundación Instituto Roche, IBM or Perkin Elmer Informatics, among others, and co-organised others within EIT-FOOD, BLUEPRINT, COST Actions, ONCONET SUDOE and MADIABETES. All this work is reflected in more than 50 publications, including Nature, Cell, Nature Genetics, Nature Communications, Genome Biology or Cell Systems, among others, with an h-index of 39 (i10=65) and a total of 6855 citations according to Google Scholar (goo.gl/YW92eo), as of 16 July 2025.
Finally, Dr. Carrillo has been invited speaker at more than 20 conferences and has participated in many national and international congresses with more than 50 communications. He is also a member of international initiatives such as the ELIXIR Food & Nutrition community; COST Action CA23110 "International networking on in vitro colon models simulating gut microbiota mediated interactions (INFOGUT)"; CA18131 "Statistical and machine learning techniques in human microbiome studies" (MC Substitute); the DFG Network (Germany) "Epigenomic profiling in paediatric lymphoid leukaemias"; and the EIT Food network (EU Commission), to accelerate innovation and increase Europe's competitiveness in the food sector.
His research focuses on studying complex diseases (such as obesity, diabetes and cancer) by integrating health, omics, genetic, environmental, lifestyle and microbiome data through statistical, bioinformatic and artificial intelligence tools, in order to develop precision nutrition strategies focused on the clinical setting. Notable projects include AI4Food (Comunidad de Madrid Y2020/TCS-6654, 2021-2024) and FNS-Cloud (H2020-EU.3.2.2.3, ID: 863059, 2019-2023), which aim to improve nutritional advice and ensure the interoperability of health and nutrition data, as well as initiatives focused on the gut microbiota to classify patients and explore its role in diseases such as obesity, cancer and coeliac disease. He also works on the study of metabolic variability in ageing and its impact on health in the projects GutFinder (Fundación Ramón Areces, 2023-2026) and NUTRIclock (Horizon Europe, 2023-2025).