Fátima Al-Shahrour, PhD in Bioinformatics, is Head of the Bioinformatics Unit at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO). Her research focuses on the application and development of computational methods for precision medicine, cancer genome interpretation, drug repurposing, and the prediction of anticancer therapies. Her group is an active node of the European ELIXIR Bioinformatics Infrastructure, leading the ELIXIR Cancer Data Focus Group to provide expertise and a framework for the systematic analysis and interpretation of cancer genomes. She is also Co-Director of the Master’s Degree in Applied Bioinformatics for Personalized Medicine and Health. Throughout her scientific career, she has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles in cancer genomics and bioinformatics, with a strong focus on translational cancer research.
Fátima Al-Shahrour earned her PhD from the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) in 2006. During her doctoral studies (2002–2006), she worked at the Bioinformatics Unit of the CNIO and at the Príncipe Felipe Research Center (CIPF) in Valencia, Spain, under the supervision of Dr. Joaquín Dopazo. During this period, her research focused on the development of novel bioinformatics tools for microarray gene expression analysis, with particular emphasis on computational methods for the functional interpretation of high-throughput experiments.
In 2007, she was awarded a José Castillejo Mobility Research Fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN) to join the Computational Biology Group of the Cancer Program at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (Cambridge, MA, USA), under the supervision of Dr. Jill P. Mesirov. Her project focused primarily on the development of computational methods to identify oncogenic transcriptional signatures.
In 2008, she was appointed Computational Biologist at the Broad Institute, where she worked in the laboratory of Dr. Benjamin L. Ebert. During this period, her research focused on studying cancer biology and therapeutics from a genomic perspective, using hematopoiesis as a model system.
After four years at the Broad Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), she returned to the CNIO in 2012 to lead the Translational Bioinformatics Unit (TBU) within the Clinical Research and Structural Biology and Biocomputing Programmes. Since 2017, she has held a permanent position at the CNIO as Head of the Bioinformatics Unit.
