"Human Evolutionary Genomics across Latin America and the Pacific"

Andrés Moreno-Estrada is a Mexican population geneticist interested in human genetic diversity and its implications in population history and medical genomics. He is a medical doctor by training (University of Guadalajara, 2002) and pursued a PhD in Evolutionary Genetics in Barcelona (Pompeu Fabra University, 2009), where he was trained in human population genetics working on the analysis of genetic variation in candidate genes under positive selection on the human lineage. Dr. Moreno was a postdoctoral fellow from 2009 to 2012 in Prof. Carlos Bustamante's group at Cornell University and Stanford University School of Medicine. He later became Research Associate of the Genetics Department at Stanford University until 2014. For his work in Latin America he was awarded the "George Rosenkranz Prize for Health Care Research in Developing Countries" in 2012. His work integrates genomics, evolution and precision medicine in projects involving large collections of understudied populations, in particular from the Americas and the Pacific. He authored the most detailed work so far of the genetic structure of the Mexican population, including the first genomic characterization of 20 diverse indigenous groups throughout Mexico (Science 2014), as well as fine-scale genomic studies in the Caribbean region (PLOS Genetics 2013), South America (PLOS Genetics 2015), and Polynesia (Nature 2020, Nature 2021). Since 2015, Prof. Moreno is the Principal Investigator of the Human Evolutionary Genomics Lab at the National Laboratory of Genomics for Biodiversity (LANGEBIO) in Mexico. He is the co-founder of the Latin American Alliance for Genomic Diversity and member of the Executive Committee of the International Common Disease Alliance (ICDA).