Curious, Playful, Supporting

"I met Guillermo when I started my internship from my Master in bioinformatics. By then he was a second year PhD and with almost no experience in bioinformatics. I remember being in front of him, in the sofas at the lobby, thinking to myself “how did I end up here?”. Turns out Guillermo ended up being the most important mentor I had so far in my life. He managed to help me create an entire new annotation tool using the latest Large Language Models without know what they were at the time. We learned together and made each other be the best version of ourselves, although I was always inspired by the papers he brought into the conversation and his overall vision on how to take projects forward. He is also very lame sometimes (i.e. making jokes like “What is the sense of life? 5’ to 3’”) but that made me feel welcomed in the lab and able to speak about any topic with him, which was key when I had a stress peak to trust and lean on him to find alternative plans. In any case, I defended my master thesis among the highest grades and presented the work at an international conference receiving amazing feedback, in part because Guillermo was always telling me to present my work at seminars, in front of our group leader, in our weekly meetings or to reach out myself to collaborators. Now I am doing a PhD in the same lab in AI guided protein design and I am very confortable when sitting at the table with prestigious researchers. In the mean time, Guillermo became a postdoctoral researcher now and he’s looking for new projects. I appreciate a lot that he is also coming to me for advice and I feel grateful I can return all the positive energy he has given me all these years. Of course, I am still looking to him for advice too. And I think I always will. Thank you Guillermo!"

Nominated by Maria Artigues, Translational Synthetic Biology Lab, Department of Medicine and Life Sciences (MELIS), Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain