I am a Medical Doctor by training and have a strong interest in understanding patterns of human genetic variation and its implications in health and disease, evolution, and population history reconstruction. After graduating from the University of Guadalajara School of Medicine in 2002, I moved from Mexico to Barcelona, Spain to pursue a PhD in Evolutionary Biology and Population Genetics, which I received from the Pompeu Fabra University in 2009.

I joined the Bustamante Lab at Stanford University in January 2010, where I got the opportunity to focus my research on population genomics in the Americas. My current work involves the use of genome-wide data sets to study fine-scale patterns of population structure in both Native Americans and Hispanic/Latino populations from throughout the Americas. One of the major goals is to better understand the evolutionary processes, including natural selection, that have shaped Native American genomes during the last ~10,000 years of independent evolution since the peopling of the Americas and before the European contact.

The other major goal is aimed at understanding the dynamics of the admixture process in present day Hispanic/Latino populations since the European contact. By applying methods of local ancestry estimation we are trying to trace back ancestry-specific segments of the genome to their potential source populations at the sub-continental level. Defining patterns of local variation and sub-continental ancestry in admixed populations and individual genomes is also allowing the field to move towards a more personalized view of medical genomics and to promote the study of diverse populations underrepresented in current catalogs of human variation.