Diego Ortega Del Vecchyo

Diego is a junior group leader at the International Laboratory for Human Genome Research. He did research on plant population genetics with Joost Van Heerwaarden and Daniel Piñero during his undergraduate studies. Then he studied how natural selection and demography jointly impact patterns of genetic variation in humans and canids in his PhD with John Novembre and Kirk Lohmueller. He did a postdoc with Montgomery Slatkin, where he developed new methods and theory to study past demographic history using genomic information from fossils and modern individuals. Now he is broadly interested in developing useful new analytical theory and computational methods that are useful for Population Genetics and Evolutionary Biology studies.

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Twitter: @dortega_delv

Valeria Cabrera Rojas

Valeria is a student in the Undergraduate Program in Genomic Sciences at ENES Juriquilla, UNAM. She is interested in population genetics and her focus is centered on the application and development of new bioinformatic methods for data analysis. She is currently doing research looking at different signatures of the impact of directional selection.

Alessandro López Hernández

Alessandro received his master’s degree in Biological Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 2023 while working in our group. He previously worked at the Molecular Anthropology Laboratory analyzing the mitocondrial haplogroups in the teenek, a Mexican indigenous population from San Luis Potosí. He is currently a PhD student and is working on the development of a new method to infer the impact of natural selection using ancient and present-day DNA data.

Alan Izarraras Gomez

Alan has an undergraduate degree in genomic biotechnology from the UANL (Autonomous University of Nuevo León) where he did research on the adaptive genetic diversity of the endangered Worthen’s sparrow (Spizella wortheni). Afterwards he moved on to do a research stay at LIIGH with Maria Avila’s group where he worked on human ancient genomics, in particular the genetic continuation of Native American mitochondrial haplogroups. He is currently enrolled as a PhD student in UNAM’s biomedical sciences program where he will be using genome-wide local genealogies as well as the site frequency spectrum in order to develop a method to infer the distribution of fitness effects in human populations.

Alumni

Valeria Añorve Garibay

Valeria was a research scientist that obtained her bachelor’s degree on Genomic Sciences at ENES Juriquilla, UNAM while working in our group. She has strong interests in population and evolutionary genomics. Her research in our group is related to understanding the difficulties of analyzing the evolution of complex traits in ancient samples. She developed a project to understand how natural selection impacts ancient phenotypes prediction and her work can be read here. She went to pursue a PhD degree at Brown University under the mentorship of Emilia Huerta-Sánchez after her research stay at our lab.

Aura B. Aguilar Roldán

Aura is a student at ENES Juriquilla of UNAM, where she is currently enrolled in the Genomic Sciences undergraduate program. She has broad interests in bioinformatics and population genetics. She collaborated in our laboratory on a project lead by Alan Izarraras, a PhD candidate, on inferring the distribution of fitness effects in human populations using genealogical trees. She went to Miguel Rentería’s lab at QIMR Berghofer after she finished her work in our lab.

Liliana Chavaje Avila

Liliana received her M.S. degree in Telecommunications from University of Denver in 2011. Her previous work focused in software testing and telephony applications. She was a Mathematics teacher at Tec de Monterrey Campus Queretaro for several years. She obtained a M.S. degree in Mathematical Engineering while working in our group. She worked on developing new methods to perform demographic inferences using ancient DNA. She is currently working on the industry in Querétaro at a company called Continental.

Jesús Abad Guzmán López

Abad is a Biotechnology Engineer from Tecnológico de Monterrey in Querétaro. Some of his interests include evolution genetics, genomics, population genetics and genomic medicine. At LIIGH he is collaborating in a project in which, through in silico simulations, he is analyzing patterns of genetic diversity due to the impact of natural selection acting on synonymous mutations. He went on to pursue a master’s degree in Biological Sciences at the Tecnológico de Monterrey after he finished his stay at our lab.

Ximena Vargas Estrada

Ximena was an undergraduate student at Arkansas State University, Campus Queretaro (ASUCQ) where she obtained a major in Biotechnology.  While she was an undergraduate, she worked in our lab on the analysis of codon usage bias on patterns of genetic variation in humans. She pursued a masters degree at New York University and became a Fulbright scholar after she finished her stay at our lab.

Are you interested in joining our lab? Please send Diego an email.