Andrés Moreno-Estrada
Andrés Moreno-Estrada is a Mexican scientist specialized in population genetics, human evolution, and medical genomics. He is a Medical Doctor by training (University of Guadalajara, 2002) and pursued a PhD in Evolutionary Genetics in Barcelona (Pompeu Fabra University, 2009), where he was trained in human population genetics and biomedical research. Dr. Moreno completed postdoctoral training at Cornell University (New York) and Stanford University (California) from 2009 to 2012. He later became Research Associate of the Genetics Department at Stanford University until 2014. In 2015, Dr. Moreno returned to Mexico as the Head of the Genomics Core Facility of the National Laboratory of Genomics for Biodiversity (LANGEBIO) and he is currently the Principal Investigator of the Human Population Genomics Lab at the Advanced Genomics Unit of CINVESTAV.
His work integrates genomics, anthropology, and evolution to study the genetic diversity of underrepresented populations, particularly from indigenous communities across Latin America and the Pacific. He authored the most detailed work of the genetic structure of the Mexican population, including the first genomic characterization of 20 diverse indigenous groups throughout Mexico (Science 2014), as well as numerous genomic studies in South America (PLOS Genetics 2015, AJHG 2022), the Caribbean (PLOS Genetics 2013), and Polynesia (Nature 2020, Nature 2021). He also studied the genetic impact of trans-Pacific Asian migrations into Mexico during colonial times (Phil B 2022), which have shaped the genetic architecture of present-day populations and the cultural mosaic of our society. He currently heads the Mexican Biobank project, producing the most complete genomic database of national scale in Mexico, which was recently published in Nature and highlighted in the cover of the magazine in October 2023. Overall, these studies have contributed to improving the representation of understudied populations in catalogs of human genetic variation.
For his work in Latin America, he was awarded the “George Rosenkranz Prize for Health Care Research in Developing Countries” in 2012. He has trained more than a dozen international students both in the United States and in Latin America. He has authored more than 55 publications with more than 32,000 citations, including high-impact journals such as Science, Nature, PNAS, AJHG and PLOS Genetics, among others. He is the co- founder of the Latin American Alliance for Genomic Diversity (LatinGenomes), coordinator of the Human Cell Map of Latin American Diversity (LatinCells), and member of the Executive Committee of the International Common Disease Alliance (ICDA).
