¿Así naces o te haces? 🤔
Muy emocionado de estar la próxima semana en el club de lectura del ISCB Student Council RSG Mexico hablando de la influencia de la genética y el ambiente en la epigenética humana 🧬☀️
El registro es libre 👇🏽

I’m very thankful to all the organizers for making this possible and for giving young people access to FREE cutting-edge science. Thank you for letting me join your scientific revolution. And thank you for sharing your week with me, future scientists 🫶🏽.

It was amazing to share my journey with so many younger people, help them in their next steps, and inspire them to follow their scientific dreams ⭐️.

The rest of the students participated in one of the other 8 workshops offered, and learnt incredible stuff from young researchers from Oxford, UNAM, NASA, INAOE, Stanford, UAEM and UdeM. From engineering their own robots 🤖, to transforming their own bacteria 🦠, and studying the galaxies 🌌.

I’m really proud of the students in my workshop, they assimilated very complex concepts in just a week! Not only the biology of aging, but coding too, and creating their first machine learning model! 👨🏽‍💻👩🏽‍💻

Me and my students spent an amazing week learning about epigenetics, aging, and machine learning 🤓. By the end of the workshop, we trained 3 epigenetic clocks, and calculated the epigenetic accelerated aging in cancer samples! 🧬

Last week I was honored to be an instructor at Clubes de Ciencia México and spend my week with incredibly talented scientists and young Mexicans.

I’m really excited and honored to be part of this new cohort of @ropensci.org Champions! 🙌🏽

Looking forward to improve my skills as a software developer, contribute to the open science community, and connect with amazing Latin American leaders in research software engineering 👨🏽‍💻

🧬 Another new preprint out of the lab: a statistical method and software for cell-type deconvolution of methylated sequencing reads, led by Ning Shen! 🧵👇

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

❤️ Finally, I want to thank everyone involved in this work! Particularly, I would like to thank to the families and staff involved in the CHILD and PREDO studies. And to my amazing supervisors @keegankorthauer.bsky.social and Dr. Michael Kobor for shaping this work with me.

🏃🏽‍♂️ We also validated the results we observed in PREDO, a Finnish cohort! Do you want to know more details? Check out our freshly pre-printed manuscript!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🧬 We found genetics to be a central contributor to DNA methylation variability in cord blood, usually in additive and interactive combinations with the environment. This highlights the importance of incorporating genetics into DNA methylation research, particularly in early life.

🫄🏽 We used RAMEN to answer this question in cord blood using CHILD, a nation-wide Canadian cohort. We studied the prenatal period since this window is highly sensitive! As we are developing, exposures, potentially mediated or reflected through DNA methylation, can impact our future health.

📊 Using machine learning and statistical techniques, RAMEN is able to estimate individual genetic, individual environmental, additive and interactive contributions to DNA methylation variability.

👨🏽‍💻 In this work, we developed RAMEN, a computational tool that integrates environmental, genetic and DNA methylation data to model how the first 2 factors associate with DNA methylation variability across the genome.

ericknavarrod.github.io/RAMEN/

🤔 Have you ever wondered how much does genetics and the environment contribute to shaping the DNA methylome? If the answer is yes, check out some of my latest research!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Lastly, I had the pleasure to present my work at the Student Symposium, where I was awarded with the second place at the best presentation competition 🎉.

Thank you to the organizers and the presenters! I had such a great time, and I look forward to the next research day 💻.

One of my highlights was attending to Dr. Helder Nakaya Keynote. In addition to the GREAT presentation about the future of biomedical research with AI omic analyses, it was really inspiring to see the innovative bioinformatics research conducted by another Latinamerican scientist on the main stage 🌎

Last week I attended the joint research day of the Bioinformatics, Genomic Sciences and Technology, and Interdisciplinary Oncology programs from The University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University 🧬

Curious about how to ace your graduate school interviews? Join us on Tuesday, December 10th at 12pm EST for a webinar held by Maria Mercedes, a current PhD candidate. This webinar will cover tips and resources for grad school interviews!
⁠
REGISTER HERE⬇️
eventbrite.com/e/how-to-ace...

I also got to see again (now Dr.) Abraham Avelar after 7 years. He mentored me in a summer research internship during my first year of undergrad at LANGEBIO. He was the first person to introduce me to coding and here I am years later doing a PhD in Bioinformatics!

I am hugely inspired by all the science by and for Latin Americans that is being conducted. I feel really happy to (re)connect with such a brilliant, resilient and creative community!

I had the most amazing time last week presenting my PhD work at the ISCB - International Society for Computational Biology - Latin America conference.