Taras K. Oleksyk is an Associate Professor in the Biology Department of the University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez, and the Director of the Caribbean Genome Center. His PhD is from the Toxicology Program at the University of Georgia in Athens where he started working on the consequences of environmental radioactivity on genetic diversity in the wild after the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine. He continued working on genetic diversity in human populations as it relates to disease at the National Cancer Institute. Dr. Oleksyk continues to work on projects in genetic diversity in diverse admixed populations from the Caribbean islands to Russia, and actively participates in the 1000 Genomes Project. Together with Dr. Martinez-Cruzado he has built one of the largest undergraduate research programs in the Caribbean focusing on next generation sequencing genomics and bioinformatics.
Juan Carlos Martinez-Cruzado is a Full Professor in the Biology Department of the University of Puerto Rico Myagüez, and the co-founder of the Caribbean Genome Center, with 25 years as a research mentor for graduate and undergraduate students. He received his PhD from Harvard University where he started to work in the field of population and evolutionary genetics. For the last 15 years his research has focused on the pre-Columbian migrations to the Caribbean that gave rise to the Native American people who first met Europeans in 1492. More recently he directed sample collections in Puerto Rico for the 1000 Genomes Project, and became an internationally recognized expert in Native American genetic variants and adaptations that have survived in the genomes of the admixed Puerto Rican population today. Together with Dr. Oleksyk he has built one of the largest undergraduate research programs in the Caribbean focusing on next generation sequencing genomics and bioinformatics.
There Is No 'Perfect Human' In Puerto Rico or Anywhere Else
Disappointed by James Watson's decision to sell his Nobel Prize medal, Lior Pachter, a computational biologist who works on genomics at the University of California Berkeley, wrote an entry on his private blog in early December protesting the decision.