Past Lab Members and Alumni

She received her doctoral degree in Biomedicine at the University of Barcelona in Spain. Her doctoral studies focused on the genetics of cardiovascular aging in HIV-infected individuals. Dr. Ibanez joined the Cruchaga Lab for her postdoctoral training in the genetics of neurodegeneration. Dr. Ibanez’ interests are focused on finding biomarkers useful for the early diagnosis of neurodegeneration, especially Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. The identification of such biomarkers will lead to a better understanding of the pathobiology of the disease, the identification of new therapeutic targets, and the possibility of the discovery of an early diagnostic tool.

Dr. Fernandez has broad expertise and extensive experience in the field of genetics that started with her study of population genetics and phylogenetic analyses in non-model organisms. She now investigates the genetics of neurodegenerative diseases in humans.

As a postdoctoral researcher, she dove into the genetics of Alzheimer’s disease (AD)  by analyzing whole-exome sequence data from early onset AD (EOAD) individuals as well as families highly affected by the disease, either late onset AD (LOAD) or autosomal dominant AD (ADAD) families. Now, as an assistant professor she investigates -omic technologies to identify common, altered pathways among the three main AD etiologies (ADAD, EOAD, and LOAD). In addition, she uses iPSC and 3D models to interrogate novel findings and their potential as therapeutic targets in the context of Alzheimer’s disease.

Umber is an MD/Ph.D student in the Neuroscience program at Washington University School of Medicine. He completed a Joint Honours Science and Economics degree at the University of Waterloo (Canada). Umber is interested in leveraging omics data to better understand, diagnose, and treat disease.

Dr. Del-Aguila is a Senior Scientist at Cruchaga lab. He received his doctoral studies on Human and Molecular Genetics at the UTHealth and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center under the mentorship of Dr. Eric Boerwinkle. He worked in a particular case of gene environment interaction, pharmacogenomics using different bioinformatics tools. After his doctoral studies, he joined Dr. Cruchaga’ s lab  in where he applied his skills to work in the identification and characterization of genetic variants implicated in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) using GWAS, WES, WGS, Imaging(PIB) and NGS (Imaging, RNA-seq, single-nuclei RNA-seq). In 2019 he was promoted to senior scientist in Dr. Cruchaga lab leading the projects focused on single nuclei brain RNA-seq analyses.