Jesus Pico

Jesús Picó is Full Professor of Automatic Control at The Department of Systems Engineering and Control of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV). In 2013 he created the Laboratory of Synthetic Biology and Biosystems Control (SB2CLab) of the Institute of Automation and Industrial Informatics (ai2) at the UPV, the first multidisciplinary lab in Spain integrating systems and control engineers, bioinformatics and biotechnologists. His research interests are in the application of systems engineering and control to biosystems and bioprocesses. In particular: (i) use of coordinates and time-scaling for the design of (higher order) sliding mode controllers and observers with application to fed-batch and continuous fermentation bioprocesses (ii) application of interval and possibility theory to the robust estimation of metabolic fluxes by means of large-scale constraint-based metabolic models of microorganisms (iii) multi-scale models integrating cell population dynamcis at the bioreactor level with constraint-based metabolic and cost-of-expression models (iv) the model-based design and experimental implementation of gene synthetic circuits for feedback control of the expression of proteins in microbial cells.

He has co-authored more than 80 journal articles and book chapters and more than 100 conference contributions, and has directed 12 doctoral theses related to the aforementioned topics. In addition, he has been a principal investigator in more than a dozen national and international projects, mostly related to the application of engineering and systems control to biosystems and bioprocesses. J. Picó has been actively involved international organisations and conferences merging systems engineering and control with biology. Thus, he has been NOC Chair and Editor of the 8th IFAC Conference on Foundations of Systems Biology in Engineering 2019, and IPC Co-Chair of the 13th IFAC Dynamics and Control of Process Systems, including Biosystems (DYCOPS 2022). Since 2008 is member of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) Technical Committee on Biosystems and Bioprocesses (TC8.4) of which J. Picó is Vice-Chair since 2018. From 2017 to May 2020 J. Picó served as co-manager of the PIN area of the Division of Coordination, Evaluation and Technical Scientific Monitoring of the State Research Agency (AEI). He also serves as regular evaluator and monitor of H2020 FET Open projects and projects of the Flanders Research Foundation (FWO) and the Spanish agencies. His interest in university training in multidisciplinary fields has resulted in his continued participation as instructor of the Valencia UPV iGEM student team and overall winner in 2018. He has tutored over 70 MSc, BSc and DEA (Diploma Advanced Studies) thesis.