Rubén Palomo Llinares

I have always been interested in understanding how things work and in finding better ways to solve complex problems. That curiosity led me to study telecommunications engineering and, over time, to apply technology and data analysis in healthcare.

In my final year at university I worked at the Aguas de Barcelona group, developing telecommunications solutions for the integrated water cycle. There I learnt how important it is to connect what is technically possible with the real needs of each project. After graduating, I went on to work as an IT systems engineer at a large consultancy. That experience consolidated my technical profile, but it also made me ask myself in which field I wanted to apply that knowledge.

I found the answer in healthcare. I trained as a hospital medical physicist (radiofísico hospitalario), a scientific and technical specialty closely linked to radiation oncology. For more than fifteen years I have worked in the Spanish public health system, collaborating with multidisciplinary teams to ensure the quality and safety of treatments and to help improve the care of cancer patients.

My interest in looking at health problems from new perspectives led me to take a master's degree in Bioinformatics and Biostatistics. There I found a field that brought together different dimensions of my career: science, technology, quantitative thinking and health. That path continued with a PhD in Public Health, Medical and Surgical Sciences focused on infodemiology, an innovative discipline that combines classical epidemiology and data science.

Since then, I have kept extending my training in machine learning, advanced data visualisation and interactive web application development. I am not interested in adopting a methodology just because it is new, but in understanding when it can offer a more appropriate, clearer or more useful answer to the problem in front of us.

This way of understanding analysis is what led Julia and me to found Azahar Data Insights. From here we help research teams and biomedical and health organisations make better decisions through biostatistics and data science, combining rigorous analysis with communication that turns results into clear, understandable and useful stories.