User:Renan A. Escalante-Chong

I am a new member of OpenWetWare!

Contact Info

Renan A. Escalante-Chong

• Renan A. Escalante-Chong
• Department of Systems Biology, Harvard University
• Email me through OpenWetWare

I learned about OpenWetWare when Pamela Silver mentioned that she had her own site on OpenWetWare. I've joined OWW because I think I could share some ideas for some protocols and I strongly believe in open and free science for everybody..

Education

• I graduated in 2009 with a BS Genomic Sciences.

• In 2005 I moved to Cuernavaca to start my undergraduate studies at the Center for Genomic Sciences of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

• In 2006 I joined Dr. Enrique Reynaud's lab at the Institute of Biotechnology. I enjoyed my time learnig Drosophila genetics and working on the characterization of ion channels.

• In 2007 I did an internship at the Institute of Cell Physiology with Dr. Alicia Gonzalez Majarrez. I worked in collaboration with a PhD student, Jorge Herrera, in the establishment of the mechanisms of regulation of a pair of duplicated genes NRG1/NRG2 in one of favourite model organisms: yeast.

• In July 2008 I was a summer student in Dr. Anton Enright's lab at the Sanger Institute and then at the EBI at the same lab. We have great fun trying to predict and describe the functions of genes, proteins, regulatory RNAs and their interactions in living organisms. My project focuses on the prediction of miRNA tissue specificity by computational methods in both human and mouse.

• In January 2009 I joined Pam Silver's lab at the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. I worked in a synthetic biology project to engineer microorganisms that produce hydrogen.

• I started my PhD in 2009 in Systems Biology at Harvard University. I am very interested in exploring quantitave approaches to predict the behavior of biological systems. This information will allow us to engineer organisms and reveal gaps in the knowledge of the system. In particular, I am interested in applying this approach to developing organisms because I believe this approach has the potential of helping in the understanding of the origin of variation and innovation in evolution.

• In the fall 2009 I worked in developing a synthetic morphogen in Sean Megason's lab.

• Currently I am working in understanding how organisms make decisions when the environment changes in Johan Paulsson's lab.

Research interests

1. Systems Biology and Synthetic Biology
2. Functional Genomics of miRNAs
3. Developmental Biology
4. My notebook

Useful links

• Bachelors in Genomic Sciences
• Center for Genomic Sciences
• Harvard University Systems Biology PhD Program
• Systems Biology
• Introductory tutorial
• OpenWetWare help pages