Tomas Perez-Acle

Hi there!,
I'm very excited to participate in this incredible course, together with such a great group of scientist coming from around the world. Being a Biologist, I have a Ph. D. in Biotechnology and a Master of Sciences in Biophysics. Currently, I'm the Director of the Centre for Bioinformatics (CBUC). The CBUC is a transdisciplinary centre for advanced research in bioinformatics located at the Faculty of Biological Sciences, at the Catholic University of Chile. Our main areas of development are; Molecular Modeling and Molecular Simulations , Computer Based Drug Design, Biological Sequence Analyses, Complex Systems and High Performance Computing. Here, at the NCBI's pubmed you can find the main scientific publications of my group. In spite of the broad interest of my research group, I'm personally interested in Open Systems Thermodynamics and Network Topology as scientific tools for the understanding of biological robustness (I think that robustness could be the best definition for complexity). Under these premises, my research can be characterized as an endless quest for the constructive role of entropy in dissipative structures, with emphasis in biological systems. The seminal work of Illya Prigogine, Gregoire Nicolis (Lecturer at this course!), Ludwig Boltzmann and the fathers of chaos; Poincare, Lyapunov and Minkowsky, among others, always enlighten the path to understanding of biology from the mathematical point of view. From the more philosophical point of view, I consider myself as a radical constructivist that likes the cybernetic vision of biological systems, best represented by Ludwig von Bertalanffy and his modern followers as Humberto Maturana and Peter Corning.
I like very much "ball based sports" as Volleyball and PingPong and also contact sports as Rugby and Taekwondo. As a latin american guy, I also like dancing; Salsa, Merengue and Tecno Music.

See you in Bariloche!!!

Tomas