Our Team

Dídac Macià is a postdoctoral researcher working at the intersection of epidemiology and immunology, with a focus on analyzing high-throughput immunological data from clinical trials and cohort studies.

He holds degrees in History (Sorbonne, Paris IV) and Physics (UNED). Initially pursuing a career in science communication, he later transitioned to research, earning a PhD in Translational Medicine (University of Barcelona), developing and evaluating geo-statistical methods applied to quantitative medical imaging. As a postdoctoral researcher, he has shifted his focus to where he believes lies the medicine of the future: immunology. 

His contributions span medical MRI imaging statistics, statistical modeling, epidemiology, and quantitative epi-immunology, recently with a particular emphasis on malaria research

Lines of research

• Determinants of immunogenicity and vaccine-Induced protection in malaria vaccines
• Methods for distinguishing antibody determinants of immunity (protection) from markers of exposure using longitudinal, multiplexed immunological data, using a causal inference framework.
• Statistical methods to assess the protective effect of pharmacological interventions in field clinical trials that are not affected by the disease dynamics
• Critical and explainable implementation of advanced multiparametric statistics and machine learning tools in systems biology.
• Optimization of multiplex and multiparametric immunoassays, primarily focusing on post-processing, calibration, and harmonization.

Main publications

• Macià D, Campo JJ, Jairoce C, Mpina M, et al. The effect of Plasmodium falciparum exposure and maternal anti-circumsporozoite protein antibodies on responses to RTS,S/AS01E vaccination in infants and children: an ancillary observational immunological study to a phase 3, randomised clinical trial. Lancet Infect Dis. 2024 Oct 23:S1473-3099(24)00527-9. 
• Mitchell RA, Macià D, Jairoce C, et al. Effect of RTS,S/AS01E vaccine booster dose on cellular immune responses in African infants and children. NPJ Vaccines. 2024 Oct 25;9(1):200. 
• Macià D, Campo JJ, Moncunill G, et al. Strong off-target antibody reactivity to malarial antigens induced by RTS,S/AS01E vaccination is associated with protection. JCI Insight. 2022 May 23;7(10):e158030.
• Sørensen Ø, Brandmaier AM, Macià D, et al. Meta-analysis of generalized additive models in neuroimaging studies. Neuroimage. 2021;224.
• Macià D, Pujol J, Blanco-Hinojo L, Martínez-Vilavella G, Martín-Santos R, Deus J. Characterization of the spatial structure of local functional connectivity using multidistance average correlation measures. Brain Connect. 2018;8(5):276-287