Industry experience

Since April 2025

Freelance Bioinformatician, Guatemala: I have been working on genome quality metrics and the phylogenetic placement of a yeast strain. In addition I also developed custom scripts to detect allergenic and toxin related protein sequences from this yeast whole genome.

May 2022 - October 2024

Bioinformatician, Data Science Department, Solena Ag, Mexico. I helped implementing the following projects: (1) assembling fungal and bacterial genomes with potential applications to crop biotechnology, (2) Nextflow pipelines: genome assembly (fungi and bacteria), taxonomic profiling, functional annotation of soil metagenomes, and AWS sample processing.

January 2021 - May 2022

Freelance Bioinformatician, Guatemala. Provided support for: (1) bioinformatics workflows, (2) stastical tests, and (3) data visualization in R for both biotech and academic projects.

Academic research

2022 - 2023

• Google Summer of Code contributor.
• Wellcome Sanger Institute, Tree of Life Programme, UK.
• Project: Conversion of the BlobToolKit Snakemake pipeline to Nextflow.
• Supervisor: Priyanka Surana, PhD.

2017 - 2019

• MSc research project:
• National Laboratory for Biodiversity Genomics, CINVESTAV, Mexico.
• Project: Gene co-expression during the embryogenesis of two protostome species.
• Supervisor: Selene Fernandez-Valverde, PhD.

Teaching experience and other jobs

2015 - 2017

• Physics teacher:
• At a local high school in Guatemala.
• Also worked as a private teacher.

2011 - 2012

• USAC, Guatemala, Faculty of Engineering, Department of Physics:
• Laboratory Instructor.
• Teaching Assistant.

Other

I have also worked in different jobs not related to academic research, teaching, or the biotechnology industry including: (1) Customer service representative in a call center at Guatemala City (2013-2014), (2) English to Spanish translator for scientific documents (2010-2011), and (3) installing network cables in buildings (2008-2010). On November 2019 I started a PhD project in Catalonia, Spain, unfortunately during 2020 I had to quit the program during the Covid-19 pandemic, returning to Guatemala until 2021 because of international travel restrictions.

Education

2017 - 2019

• MSc in Integrative Biology.
• National Laboratory for Biodiversity Genomics, CINVESTAV, Mexico.
• Lab: Functional and Evolutionary Genomics of Regulatory RNA led by Selene Fernandez-Valverde, PhD.
• Thesis: Comparing gene co-expression during the embryogenesis of two protostome species.

2008 - 2015

• Bachelor of Science in Applied Physics.
• Faculty of Engineering, now the School of Physical Sciences and Mathematics, USAC, Guatemala.
• Thesis, in Spanish.

Grants

2022

• Google Summer of Code contributor grant.

2017 - 2019

CONACYT, currently: SECIHTI, Mexico grant for post-graduate studies.