Happy holidays from the CG&Bio Lab!
Another year has passed and it’s the time of the year when we think about what we’ve achieved, where we need to improve and our objectives for the year to come. During 2019:
- We officially welcomed 2 new PhD students and one MSc student to our lab – Congratulations Paty, Irving and Fer! We are very excited about the projects they will be working on: Deciphering the mutational landscape and genetic risk factors of acral lentiginous melanoma, and our first effort into investigating the genomics of liver cancer. Welcome!
- Talking about liver cancer, we obtained our first grant to work on the genomics and transcriptomics of this tumour type from CONACyT, which was mainly written by postdoc Christian Molina. Congratulations Christian! We also obtained funding to do more work on melanoma from CONACyT, the Wellcome Sanger Institute and UNAM.
- PhD student Caro Castañeda attended a Cancer Epidemiology course at IARC and is now completing an internship at Prof. Ludmil Alexandrov’s lab at UCSD, supported by UC Mexus/CONACyT and the Academy of Medical Sciences, UK. We’re looking forward to seeing what she’s learnt and to our novel collaborations with Prof. Alexandrov’s group!
- We hosted our collaborators Prof. Tim Bishop, Prof. Julia Newton-Bishop and Dr. Mark Iles from the University of Leeds, UK, at LIIGH-UNAM in March. They taught a week-long course on ‘Statistics for GWAS’ and will be coming back again in 2020 for the follow-up. Stay tuned for topics and dates!
- We taught a NGS course for Latin American scientists in Chile, gave several talks at national and international venues and hosted an emeritus NIH professor, Heinz Arnheiter, at LIIGH during the summer months. An academically rich environment overall where we learnt loads.
- Published 6 papers either from our own lab or in collaboration with others
- Received appointments as a Wellcome Sanger Institute International Fellow and CONACyT SNI level II investigator, which will take effect from next year. Daniela also started working for eLife as a Reviewing Editor for the Cancer Biology and Genetics and Genomics sections, and will take a post as a Social Media editor for the journal PCMR from next year.
For 2020, we are hoping to see our first PhD students graduate, and finally see the first projects from our lab develop, after a few years in the making! We are also hoping to expand our new liver cancer research line and form new collaborators in this area.
Here’s to a great 2020. Happy holidays and see you next year! 🙂