Originally from Bogota, Colombia, Duber studied Economics with a concentration in mathematical modeling. He came to the USA to study and received his BS in Applied Statistics in 2013 from the University of Houston-Downtown. In 2019 he earned his PhD in Computational Data-Enabled Science and Engineering from Jackson State University in Jackson, MS. While working toward his PhD, he was exposed to several projects ranging from geographical information systems, traffic flow models, and measuring the therapeutic mechanism of Vernonia Amygdalina (fraction A) in the treatment of prostate cancer.
Duber was involved in genetic studies after spending two internships at the National Human Genetic Research Institute in 2017 and 2018, where he had the opportunity to combine machine learning techniques (random forest algorithm) with genetics.
In September 2019, he joined the University of Pennsylvania in a 2-year postdoc where he learned to perform genome-wide pleiotropy analysis and evaluated statistical analyses using genomic datasets of Alzheimer diseases (AD) from the International Genome of Alzheimer’s project (IGAP). Duber also gained experience with related neurodegenerative diseases and genome-wide association studies (GWAS) in AD genetic consortium (ADGC), Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP), and sequencing studies from the AD Sequencing Project (ADSP).