My name is Pavel Baykalov (ESR12). Although I am coming from Spain, where I grew up, I was born in Russia. And to extend my list of countries where I lived, now I am doing my PhD project in a beautiful city of Vienna, Austria.

My bachelor degree was achieved at the Autonomous University of Madrid, in the field of Biology. Since starting it, I was always interested in lab specialization subjects, such as genetics, biochemistry or biotechnology. However, in the last year, I discover the Bioinformatics, which is a cool combination of biology and computational science. Then I started to learn how to program and write code and participated in a voluntary internship in the Bioinformatics Department at the Centre for Molecular Biology “Severo Ochoa” (CBMSO), where I also made my Bachelor thesis.

After that, my interest in programming didn’t diminish and I enrolled in a Master degree of Bioinformatics and Biostatistics at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. There, I improved my programming skills and learn to love statistics. During my master, I had a great opportunity to do an internship in Köln at Miltenyi Biotec GmbH company, where I discovered another interesting research area, such as image processing. It made me choose a master thesis that combines image processing and artificial neural networks.

And now, while doing my PhD, I am still discovering interesting and knowledgeable fields such as electronics, which I am ready to learn. I hope that during this project, besides acquiring the new skills and knowledge and improving the already ones, I will engage in a unique network of researchers and develop a relevant technology that someday could change the world!