Ignacio joined IQ Biology in Fall 2016 and was听a听Ph.D. student in the computer science department, co-advised by Dr. Robin Dowell at BioFrontiers Institute and Dr. Larry Hunter at Anschutz Medical Campus. His research is driven by a desire to develop computational alternatives to reduce, refine and eventually replace animal testing across multiple areas of bioscience. Ignacio's focus is on utilizing data from in vitro genomics assays to discover mechanisms of toxicity, while integrating existing heterogeneous knowledge sources in a semantically-consistent fashion to aid the discovery process. IQ Biology has been instrumental to learn the molecular biology background necessary to embark on this type of research, by becoming "bilingual" in order to bridge the worlds of biology and computational sciences.
Ignacio has been the recipient of the Olke C. Uhlenbeck Graduate Fellowship, the Diversity Initiatives Endowment Career Development Award from the Society of Toxicology, and the BioCreative VI Workshop Travel Award Fellowship. He presented his paper on drug-drug interaction discovery at 2017 IEEE's Bioinformatics conference, had posters accepted at Rocky Mountain Bioinformatics 2016 and 2017, presented a poster on chemical-protein relation extraction at the Society of Toxicology Annual Meeting in 2018, and was awarded听with F1000's Outstanding Presentation prize for Excellent Research for his听poster on differential TF activity detection using ATAC-seq at ISCB's Next-Gen Sequencing conference in Barcelona (NGS 2018).
Ignacio received a BS degree from the University of North Texas and majored in Computer Science.听Ignacio rotated with Dr. Lawrence Hunter听in the Computational Bioscience Program at Anschutz Medical Campus, Dr. Amy Palmer in the Department of Biochemistry, and听Dr. Robin Dowell in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology. Ignacio graduated in Spring 2020.
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