Héctor Gómez Díaz (Lugo, 1980) is a civil engineer and doctor from the Universidade da Coruña. He has been a visiting professor at the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences in Texas (USA) and full professor at the Universidade da Coruña. Currently, he is an associate professor at Purdue University. He has received numerous international awards and recognitions such as the Starting Grant from the European Research Council, the Juan C. Simó award for best young researcher in computational mechanics, the Agustín de Betancourt award for best researcher under 40 in any field of engineering, and he has been selected as one of MIT Technology Review’s ‘Innovators under 35’.

Héctor has dedicated much of his career to computational engineering, particularly its use in the field of medicine. One example of his achievements is the MuSIC project, which uses very complex equations, a huge amount of data and large-scale computer simulations to generate a personalised prediction of prostate cancer growth. The project adopts the philosophy of a new trend known as predictive medicine. A fundamental innovation in MuSIC is that it develops and validates its methodology using specific anatomies and data for each patient, a previously unexplored idea in the field of prostate cancer.