Also, special shoutout to all the undergrad and high school students that presented their research in the poster sessions! It’s so inspiring to see the passion for science in younger students 🫶🏽

During the pre-congress workshop, I talked about gene-environment interactions, their relevance in precision medicine, and the challenges of studying them in the postgenomic era. I highlighted promising technologies that are allowing us to study this phenomenon in omic data sets

Last week I was invited as a keynote speaker to the 2nd International Congress EnviroEpiHealth at Benemerita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla. I had an amazing time learning about all the incredibly meaningful exposome research that is conducted in the region to address health issues 🧬🌎.

¿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 🫶🏽.

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.

🧬 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.

📊 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/

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 🧬

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