Jacobo Pardo-Seco
Researcher
“He preferido hablar de cosas imposibles porque de los posible se sabe demasiado “ (I have preferred to talk about impossible things, because we already know too much of what is possible). Silvio Rodríguez.
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I’m a mathematician graduated at the University of Santiago in 2009. This year I started an inter-university master’s degree in Statistical Techniques organized by the Universities of A Coruña, Santiago de Compostela and Vigo. In 2011, I successfully obtained the MSc degree and after that I started to work as a technician researcher in data management and statistical analysis at the Hospital Clínico Universitario de Santiago as a team member of the CIBERESP network (Biomedical Research Network for Epidemiology and Public Health). I joined to the group in 2012 as a PhD student, obtaining in 2013 a pre-doctoral fellowship offered by Fundación Ramón Domínguez. In 2017 I finally obtained the PhD degree with a thesis entitled Estudio de la variabilidad genómica global en poblaciones humanas, where I analyzed the genomic variability in human populations. Nowadays I’m still working as postdoc researcher collaborating in almost all project in which this group is involved.
I have developed multiple projects related to infectious diseases susceptibility from a genomic perspective. I participated in the elaboration of several manuscript regarding exome sequencing of patients who suffered severe infections of pathogens such as syncytial respiratory virus (RSV) or pneumococcus pneumoniae. I also work in other fields such as genomic population structure, epidemiologic, immunologic, proteomic or transcriptomic studies. One of the most important facts of working in GENVIP is its multidisciplinary, which allows me to be in touch with different scientific topics and perspectives. This implies that I’m always learning, something that makes me grow as scientist.
Due to my educational background and the amount of data generated by this group, especially in genomic studies, I have to develop programming skill specially related to statistical software (R) and bioinformatic tools. I also collaborated in the development of two web-tools: one of them was implemented to estimate statistical power for case-controls studies regarding to mitochondrial background; the other one allows to compute the biogeographical ancestry using STR markers.
The genomic science is my passion, and although infectious diseases are my main study target, I enjoy studying human populations genomic data to infer its history and understand how we come to nowadays. With genetics we can elucidate from the origin of Etruscan civilization to the journey through time of individuals affected by Transatlantic slave trade. At the end, I strongly believe that we don’t know who we are if we don’t know where we are from.