Fernando Riveros Mckay Aguilera

PhD Student

Alumni

This person is a member of Sanger Institute Alumni.

I am a statistical geneticist with a strong interest in gaining further insights into the genetic architecure of cardiometabolic traits.

My PhD involved expanding the knowledge on the genetic architecture of specific cardiometabolic traits by using a wide variety of approaches with diverse genotypic and phenotypic resolution. This included:

• Exploring the genetic architecture of persitently thin and healthy individuals and contrasting it to that of severe childhood obesity.
• Studying the influence of rare variation on > 200 metabolic biomarkers in a population of healthy blood donors.
• Characterising the heritability of fructosamine and its genetic relationship with other glycaemic traits.

I completed my Masters in Biochemistry at the UNAM in Mexico where I worked on the development of de novo assembly pipelines for bacterial genomes. Prior to my PhD, I also worked for 4 years at Winter Genomics, a start-up in Mexico providing bioinformatics services to various research institutes.

I am mostly interested in harnessing the potential of genetic data to improve the quality of patient care in the clinic. In particular, I am very interested in exploring how genetic studies can lead to identification of potential drug targets for cardiovascular and metabolic disease; and how these can also help in patient stratification based on genetic risk.