Biographical Information
Molecular Biology, with a focus on the Biology of Cancer and Development, and mechanisms of Neurodegeneration
Ph.D. - Neuroscience and Cognition
Universidade Federal do ABC, São Bernardo do Campo, São Paulo - Brazil
B.A. - Biology, University of Georgia, Athens (USA)
Skills at the bench...
(Keywords) Molecular biology. RT-PCR. Proteomics. Yeast two-hybrid. Southern, western and northern blot. Immunoprecipitation. Immunofluorescence. RNAi, siRNA, shRNA. Lentivirus. Protein expression and purification. Human embryonic stem cells. Caenorhabditis elegans. Cancer. Glioblastoma. microRNA. Development. Differentiation. Neurodegeneration. Alzheimer’s disease. Beta-amyloid. Histone deacetylases and inhibitors. Apoptosis. Cell cycle.
Interests I would like to develop...
RNA-Seq - I think that it’s undeniable that technology is advancing at a breakneck pace, and to remain competitive a researcher must make avail of the state of the art to their advantage. There is no question in my mind that RNA-Seq is one such technology, and given the emergence of RNA biology in the past two decades, the exploratory power of RNA-Seq is simply impossible to ignore.
Bioinformatics - The advent of high-throughput experimental platforms has flooded labs and online databases with an enormous amount of data for which we are only now beginning to harness to tools to analyze and interpret. For this reason, labs that generate huge datasets either have in-house bioinformaticians or have collaborations with bioinformatics labs. I’ve sat fiddling with data from online databases like NCBI’s GEO Profiles in order to develop hypotheses and to look at gene interaction networks, but I realize that I’m only scratching the surface, and at some point in my career I would really like to formalize my bioinformatics training, which I believe would complement my molecular biology background.
A brief biography in photos...
I was born in Puerto Rico, a dependency of the United States, to a Puerto Rican father and a Dominican mother. At a young age my nuclear family moved to the Southeastern continental United States. The bulk of my paternal family is still in Puerto Rico, while the majority of my maternal family now lives in various places along the Eastern seaboard of the United States.
After moving around several cities in Northern Florida, we finally settled down in Atlanta, where I completed elementary school, and attended Lakeside High School. My favorite subjects were Latin (4 years) and English Literature, although I did very well in Biology and Anatomy.
I completed my Bachelor’s degree in Biology at the University of Georgia (Athens). While the Biology curriculum was broad, and included courses in Ecology, I took several elective courses offered by the Department of Cell Biology, including Lab Methods in Molecular Biology, Developmental Biology, Physiology and Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy. I also took several Portuguese language courses, and an advanced Italian language course.
Prior to graduating I began working as a paid laboratory assistant in the lab of Dr. Edward Kipreos*, whose research into regulation of cell cycle in the context of development in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans has made significant contributions to cancer research and cell biology. What started as a job washing lab glassware led to invaluable opportunities learn molecular biology first hand, and to eventually participate in publishable scientific research!
Edward Kipreos’ Profile Page: http://cellbio.uga.edu/directory/faculty/edward-t-kipreos
I am presently at the Universidade Federal do ABC (UFABC), a federally mandated University serving the rapidly expanding “ABC” submetropolitan area adjacent to São Paulo city. The University largely specializes in Science and Engineering, and is exceptional within Brazil for two notable reasons. First, it is the only federal University in Brazil in which all professors are Ph.D.s, and second, it is the only University in Brazil with an impact factor in scientific publication to surpass the world average (see UFABC reference below). Our lab group, led by Dr. Daniel Carneiro Carrettiero, studies Neurodegeneration from both a molecular and behavioral perspective. We presently have one post-doc, three graduate students, and several undergraduate trainees.
São Paulo has the twelfth largest city by population, surpassing New York, Mexico City and Tokyo, and has the 10th largest GDP in the world. As you might expect, the city is a vibrant and eclectic collection of immigrant and local cultures. São Paulo is a very urban industrial center, with its antennae squarely attuned to the international avant garde in art, fashion, culture and gastronomy. Verily, Brazil is a sociopolitical “portmanteau” of many countries, languages, and cultures all under one flag.
A few years ago a growth in science spending and recruitment by the Brazilian government attracted the attention of the international research community (Pyne, 2011; Petherick, 2010), but a slowing economy have forced budget cuts in several areas (Simoes and Galvao, 2015), and investment in science (Editorial - Nature Physics, 2014) and science education (Globo, 2015) have been suffering as the economy struggles to recover its prior momentum. Nevertheless, the expectation is that, with significant economic and political reform, science and technology in Brazil will prosper in the long term, and that Brazil will emerge on the global stage as a key player in the international research community.
References
UFABC Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universidade_Federal_do_ABC
Solana Pyne. Brazil invests in science and technology. March 21, 2011. http://www.pri.org/stories/2011-03-21/brazil-invests-science-and-technology
Anna Petherick. High hopes for Brazilian science. Nature 465, 674-675(2010) http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100609/full/465674a.html
Editorial. Keep the ball rolling. Nature Physics 10, 787 (2014). http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v10/n11/full/nphys3160.html
Carla Simoes and Arnaldo Galvao. Brazil Freezes $22.6 Billion in Spending From 2015 Budget. Bloomberg Business. May 22, 2015.
"MEC diz que Capes garante 90% da verba para pós-graduação em 2015. Universidades federais dizem, porém, que Capes reduziu verba em 75%. Ministro diz que situação não é 'ideal', mas que não justifica 'pânico'." Globo.
São Paulo city (upper frame) is only 30 - 40 minutes by automobile from the ocean, and 3 - 4 hours from Rio de Janeiro. Our lab group (lower left) together with collaborators from the University of São Paulo (USP), and the UFABC Santo André Campus building (lower right).
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