I am a Senior Scientist at UCSF's Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases, where I lead an independent research program on region- and cell-type-specific vulnerability across neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disease. I work to understand why specific brain regions and glial populations — particularly astrocytes — break down selectively in Alzheimer's disease, brain aging, and schizophrenia, studying this directly in human postmortem brain tissue with spatial transcriptomics, single-nucleus RNA sequencing, and multi-omics.
What defines my work is doing the whole arc of a project myself — from cell culture and in vivo models, through tissue processing, to the computational analysis that makes sense of the data. Few researchers can both generate and interpret multimodal datasets from human brain end to end, and I've built that range across progressively more competitive environments: from my training in Peru, to a MEXT-funded PhD at Kyushu University in Japan, to UCSF and RIKEN. I've earned independent funding at each step — the Alzheimer's Association AARG-D, the RIKEN Director's Grant, and a JSPS Kakenhi — and I continue to collaborate as a Visiting Scientist at RIKEN IMS.
This work has produced 15+ peer-reviewed publications and 1,300+ citations. Current projects include spatially resolved astrocyte vulnerability in APOE4 aging, interlaminar astrocyte dysfunction in schizophrenia, microglial collapse in Nasu-Hakola disease, and multimodal spatial-metabolomic integration of the human brain.