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 🫶🏽

I’m very thankful with Dr. Karla Rubio and Dra. María Bringas for the invite and the incredible experience. I’m really excited to connect with the exposome community in my home country, and I’m looking forward to see this relevant field grow 🙌🏽 #EnviroEpiHealthMX

Finally, at the conference I talked about my research developing methods to do so, particularly in the context of estimating genome-wide gene-environment interactions in DNA methylation👨🏽‍💻

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

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! 🧬

❤️ 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/

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 🌎