Lucía Prieto Santamaría

Bio

Lucía Prieto Santamaría is an Assistant Professor at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) and a researcher at the Medical Data Analytics Laboratory (MEDAL) of the Center for Biomedical Technology (CTB-UPM). She holds a Ph.D. in Software, Systems, and Computing (2023), a Master's degree in Computational Biology (2019), and a Bachelor's degree in Biotechnology (2018).
Her research lies at the intersection of biomedical and computational sciences, with a strong focus on network medicine and drug repurposing. Her expertise spans medical knowledge representation, biomedical informatics, and health-related social media analysis, with artificial intelligence playing a central role in her work. Over the years, she has contributed to several national and international research projects and has authored and co-authored multiple JCR-indexed journal articles and conference papers.
Her doctoral thesis, supervised by Professor Alejandro Rodríguez-González and Dr. Yuliana Pérez Gallardo, was awarded the Premio Extraordinario de Doctorado 2022-23 (UPM) and the Premio Francisco del Pozo 2023 (CTB). It explored new frontiers in drug repurposing and disease understanding through large-scale data analysis. From January to June 2023, she conducted a pre-doctoral research stay at Professor Albert-László Barabási's laboratory (Northeastern University, Boston, USA).
She is an active member of the scientific community, serving as a reviewer for various journals and conferences. She is part of the Steering Committee of the IEEE International Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems (CBMS), where she has also served as a Program Committee Chair for the 2024 and 2025 editions. Additionally, she is an Associate Editor for the Springer journal Progress in Artificial Intelligence (PRAI) and has participated as a Guest Editor for Special Issues in journals such as BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making and Health Information Science and Systems. She is a member of several Spanish scientific societies and currently holds a leadership position within the Training and Career Development Directorate of the Spanish Society of Artificial Intelligence in Biomedicine (IABiomed).
Beyond her research, she is actively involved in teaching at the Department of Computer Languages and Systems and Software Engineering at the School of Computer Engineering (ETSIInf-UPM), covering topics such as databases, data processing, data analytics, and complex data in health. Throughout her academic career, she has taught in multiple undergraduate and graduate programs, including Data Science, Computer Engineering, and Biotechnology, among others. She has also contributed to bioinformatics and artificial intelligence education as an external professor at Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR).
She has supervised and co-supervised numerous Master's and Bachelor's theses, guiding students in topics related to biomedical data science, artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, and network medicine. She is currently supervising two PhD theses. Her mentorship has led to high-impact research projects, including award-winning theses and publications in international journals and conferences.