Profile
Eddie Cano Gamez
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About Me:
My name is Eddie Cano Gamez. I was born in a small town near Mexico City in Mexico. Nowadays, I live with my partner in Oxford and work as a researcher. I love music and enjoy playing the guitar and singing. I also love reading and cooking. My favourite book is Rebecca and my favourite dish is tacos.
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My family comes from a small town called Tepotzotlan, half an hour north of Mexico City. This town is also one of my favourite places: it has an impressive church with interiors covered in gold, and I have many fond memories strolling through its streets with my family.
I lived near this area most of my life, and I first moved to the UK five years ago to study a PhD at the University of Cambridge. I completed my PhD last year, and then moved to Oxford, a city which I have grown to love. I like the atmosphere of Oxford: its museums, its parks, and its history. Oxford has also given by the opportunity to play music, and you can often see me and my partner perform in the Jericho neighbourhood. We love singing folk music.
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Sometimes different people who get the same infection react to it very differently. While someone might only get a temperature or be in bed for a day, someone else could get very ill and end up in hospital. The work I’m doing in Oxford tries to predict who will react badly to an infection. To do so, we obtain a small amount of blood from the person in question and ask which genes are ON and OFF. Genes are the instructions contained in our DNA, and so by knowing which of these are ON we can understand the state of our body and our immune system.
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My Typical Day:
On a typical day, I wake up and have a nice cup of tea. I then sit at my computer (either at home or at my office) and start analysing data. Analysing data might sound boring, but it is one of my favourite things to do. This is because I get to see with my own eyes all of these patterns which tell us how the human body reacts to an infection. And, most importantly, nobody tells me what to do or how to do it: I get to interpret and understand this information. I can be creative and try new things all the time. I then have lunch and often spend the afternoon meeting people to discuss what new and exciting science we can do. I also read a lot: I need to be informed of what other scientists are doing all over the world.
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“Analysing data” may not tell you much. It sounds very vague and abstract, so let me go into some more detail. The DNA we have, which we inherited from our parents, contains thousands of genes (around 40,000 to be precise). The experiments we do in the lab tell us which of these genes are ON and OFF in a given person. This means we have tens of thousands of numbers per person! That’s a lot of information. How do we make sense of it? The first thing I often do is turn these thousands of numbers into something I can see with my own eyes. I do this by finding patterns and creating images to show them, like graphs.
Once I understand what is going on, I can combine the information from hundreds of people together. I do this using “machine learning”, or “artificial intelligence”, as people often call it. You might have heard this term in science fiction films or comics. And even apps like Instagram and TikTok use it! The idea is quite simple: I give the computer all of this information and then the computer learns to recognise patterns. Based on what the computer learnt, we can then predict if a new person, which we have never seen before, will become very ill or not. And this is all based on which genes are active in our blood!
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Education:
- Centro Escolar del Lago (a school in Mexico, where I did everything from Kindergarten to Sixth form)
- Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico (where I studied my undergrad in Biotechnology)
- University of Auckland, New Zealand (I studied here for six amazing months)
- University of Cambridge (where I studied my Master and PhD)
- University of Oxford ( I work here now)
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Qualifications:
I am Mexican, so I am not really sure what GCSEs or O-levels are, as surprising as this may be
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Work History:
- When I was in school I helped my dad at his work: he is an electrical engineer
- When I was in university, I taught math to primary school children
- When I was doing my PhD, I taught data science to teenagers
- I now work as a researcher at the University of Oxford
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My Interview
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How would you describe yourself in 3 words?
Full-time scientist, part-time musician
Who is your favourite singer or band?
Florence + the machine and Johan Sebastian Bach
What's your favourite food?
Tacos!
If you had 3 wishes for yourself what would they be? - be honest!
Speaking every language in the world, travelling to outer space, and having a pet cat
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