I’m a Nicaraguan computational clinician working at the Würzburg Institute for Systems Immunology WüSI. As a Junior Professor in Single-Cell Biology at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg my research focuses on understanding the mechanisms of genome plasticity and evolution at the single-cell level, and how they regulate the dynamics of cellular communication and metabolism that drive organogenesis and evolvability. My team does this using a mixture of computational biology and spatially-resolved single-cell technologies.
The scientific journey
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Julius-Maximilian-Universität Würzburg and Max Planck Systems Immunology / Junior Professor
May 2023 - Present, Würzburg, Germany
As a Junior Professor in Single Cell Biology, my research group investigate the cellular basis of disease. Using a combination of computational methods, spatially-resolved single-cell technologies, and animal models, we study the cellular circuits of metabolism, transcriptional regulation and cell-cell communication that govern tissue homoestasis, host-pathogen interactions, and cellular evolution.
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Institute of Computational Biology - Helmholtz Munich / Group leader
May 2021 - May 2023, Munich, Germany
At ICB, I led the Computational Infection Biology lab. My group focused on the study of cellular circuits during the inflammatory response to infection using a combination of spatially-resolved single cell multiomics from the host and the pathogen, clinical records and machine learning methods.
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Wellcome Sanger Institute and EMBL-EBI / Postdoctoral fellow
September 2018 - May 2021, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Working in Sarah Teichmann’s lab with large scale, multi-omics single cell datasets and artificial intelligence methods, and being opinionated about it. My research interests include the transcriptional regulation of the adult human heart, myeloid immune cells and their interaction during heart injury repair. I also collaborated in the deployment of state-of-the-art single cell analysis tools for the Human Cell Atlas web portal at EMBL-EBI.
On September 2020 we published the single cell atlas of the human heart in Nature.
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The Francis Crick Institute / Postdoctoral fellow
September 2016 - September 2018, London, United Kingdom
I worked in the Malaria immunology laboratory using machine learning methods applied to RNA-Seq and proteomic data, as well as publicly available datasets, to study the immunological processes involved during malaria infection in a mouse model with Plasmodium chabaudi.
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London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine / Visiting researcher
June 2015 - September 2016, London, United Kingdom
I worked with Michael Miles at the LSHTM on genome analysis of Leishmania Spp. and Trypanosoma cruzi hybrids. I also worked in the development of diagnostic tools for Strongyloides spp. using proteomic and genomic public datasets.
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Cell and Molecular Biology, Karolinska Institutet / Ph.D student
March 2012 - September 2016, Stockholm, Sweden
I studied genomic variation in clinical and field isolates of Trypanosoma cruzi with Bjӧrn Andersson. I also worked in the development of analysis pipelines for single cell RNA-Seq of immune cells with statistical learning methods with Jonas Frisén. I also assembled and annotated the Pleurodeles waltl genome, used as a model for regeneration with András Simon. Besides the computational work, I also gained experience with DNA and RNA NGS library preparation.
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Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab) / Bioinformatician
January 2011 - March 2012, Stockholm, Sweden
I worked as a bioinformatician for the Spruce Genome Consortium testing and developing assembly methods for large genomes and comparative genomics of conifers. During this period I gained experience on programming languages and high-throughput computational tools.
A complete list of my scientific contributions can be found in Pubmed or Google Scholar.