Meet Paola:

Paola is a PhD student in Medical Genetics, co-supervised by Dr. Jessica Dennis and Dr. Mike Kobor. Before joining the University of British Columbia for her Graduate Studies, she completed a degree in Genomic Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. As a Mexican student she hates to perpetuate stereotypes but she does love dancing, even though she’ll readily admit that she is probably the worst dancer you will ever know. To keep her and other people safe from her two left feet, she likes to keep other hobbies such as board games and watercolor painting.

More about her work in the Dennis Lab:

A tremendous gap exists in genetic information for non-European populations, leaving a large proportion of the world behind in the personalized genomic medicine revolution. Her research focuses on closing this gap. To accomplish this, she investigates associations between ancestrally-informed polygenic scores and health outcomes in diverse populations, with extensions to other health-relevant biomarkers, such as epigenetic clocks and global DNA methylation patterns.