Ricardo O. Ramirez Flores

I studied Genomics and Applied Statistics in UNAM, Mexico. Throughout my education, I worked in UNAM’s Center for Genomic Sciences, RWTH Aachen University and the University of Florida. Currently, I am pursuing a PhD in Computational Biomedicine in Prof. Julio Saez-Rodriguez group at Universität Heidelberg. My experience is in the statistical analysis of multi-omic data sets and in the development of functional genomics models/tools. I’m interested in combining the power of data analysis with medical knowledge to integrate different layers of biological information. This systems biology perspective should allow us to translate biomarkers into points of disease convergence and complement the diagnosis repertoire. Specifically, I’m interested in transforming highly dimensional omics data sets into functional biology features to make statistical models more interpretable. My current research is focused on combining omics data at multiple scales (bulk, single-cell, and spatial) to understand the cellular organization of cardiac tissue and its changes during disease. I am interested in studying how the cellular organization in tissues influences diverse behaviors of individual cells and vice versa. This represents framing the observed transcriptional variability of a given cell type as the consequence of intrinsic signaling mechanisms coupled to local and global tissue responses that require the coordination of multiple cell types. In the context of cardiomyopathies, this perspective allows questioning if distinct etiologies that cause heart failure lead to similar tissue remodeling processes that associate with convergent cell phenotypes. For the same reason, I have also focused on systemic meta-analyses of distinct patient cohorts and etiologies to provide consensus transcriptional signatures that serve as references for future studies.