This award, given by the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States (UC MEXUS) and the National Council for Research and Technology of Mexico (CONACYT) is intended to help establish long-lasting collaborations between scientists based in University of California campuses and in Mexican institutions.

In this spirit, we are thrilled to be starting a formal collaboration with Prof. Ludmil Alexandrov, of the University of California, San Diego – widely recognised as the founder of the field of mutational signatures in cancer. This Award will allow PhD students from both groups to undertake reciprocal research internships to train in different specialised bioinformatic techniques (UCSD lab: Mutational signature analysis, UNAM lab: causal germline variant prioritisation), project planning meetings, as well as providing funds for expanding our institutional computer cluster and for performing bench experiments for hypothesis testing.

Kudos to Caro Castañeda, the PhD student in our lab who will be leading this collaboration from our side! Loads of exciting science to come 🙂

We are deeply thankful to UC MEXUS and CONACYT for this opportunity, and can’t wait to see what the results will be!