Project History
Take a walk through my career trajectory in reverse chronological order.
PhD Program:
Neural Science @ NYU
I am currently a Department of Energy-sponsored Computational Sciences Graduate Fellow, pursuing research jointly supervised by Dr. Cristina Savin and Dr. Christine Constantinople. Privileged with access to tremendous computational and experimental expertise to study decision-making, I am pursuing training that will allow me to better understand the construction of theoretical frameworks that allow us to evaluate decision-making from rodents to humans, and help contribute to answering the many fundamental questions that span the space between them. Currently, I am coordinating the deployment of the “Individual Differences in Subjective Preference”, where we aim to understand “reference-dependent decision making”, a phenomena we’ve all experienced, where we may value something more or less based on its relative value to something else, instead of its own intrinsic value, and we may reflect that value in how we make decisions taking them into consideration.
As a Krell Institute fellow, I have also spent a summer at Argonne National Labs, contributing to the GenSLMs project, which was awarded the special Gordon Bell Prize in COVID-19 Research.
COVID-19 en Puerto Rico
En marzo del 2020, el Instituto de Estadísticas de Puerto Rico publicó la primera de datos diarios en estadisticas.pr/en/covid-19. Sin embargo, a medida que más pruebas se realizaban, menos datos se le hicieron disponibles. El Departamento de Salud de Puerto Rico ha cambió la política de datos varias veces, hasta dejar el Instituto de Estadísticas sin datos desde el 29 de marzo de 2020 hasta nuevo aviso. Cómo alternativa, comencé a colaborar con la Coalición de Salud Comunitaria de Puerto Rico para la recopilación y visualización de datos de cualquier repositorio a nuestro alcance. La comunidad científica puertorriqueña entera tuvo el deber de exigirle a nuestro gobierno que los datos se mantuvieran accesibles y cómo principal sustento de toda política pública entablada, cosa que se mantiene siendo el caso, con el dashboard independiente mantenido por el Dr. Rafael Irizarry de Harvard University, en tpr.covidpr.info.
Por mi parte, tuve el privilegio de ser reclutado por la Dra. Fabiola Cruz López, y colaborar en la construcción del Sistema Municipal de Investigación de Casos y Rastreo de Contactos de Puerto Rico, SMICRCPR. Con un equipo interdisciplinario de científicos, matemáticos, ingenieros y artistas, construíamos informes semanales para mantener a nuestra gente, y clase política, informada sobre las condiciones actuales del COVID-19 en nuestra isla. La construcción de este sistema bajo la tutela del Secretario de Salud, Dr. Lorenzo González Feliciano, fue documentada como respuesta ejemplar en el libro, “Health Informatics and Patient Safety in Times of Crisis”, en su capítulo 11, titulado, “The Road to Data-Driven Public Health Emergency Response in the Overseas Territory of Puerto Rico”.
Distanciamiento social y otras consideraciones
Una guía sencilla a los aspectos cuantitativos más importantes para entender nuestra situación actual de cara al futuro con el Coronavirus.
Social Network Analysis for the PhD Interview Process.
Leverage data science to uncover connections between faculty across institutions, and model topic interactions. Graduate School interview season is firing up in the United States, and that means you’ll meet tons of important people in a niche field that may know each other. As you prepare, you will start to realize just how small the world is, and how faculty across the country, and across the world, have built their careers in collaboration and share a mutual respect for each other
Developmental trajectory characterization through neuroimaging.
The Amaya Lab, with the support of the NIH and a team spanning neuroscientists, clinical psychologists, and statisticians at the Puerto Rican Clinical and Translational Research Consortium, has taken a truly interdisciplinary approach to characterizing developmental trajectories of Autism-Spectrum disorder high-risk populations using neuroimaging technologies. Implementing a series of neuroimaging and behavioral techniques, we explore questions in neural development with a strong interdisciplinary approach. I served as lab technician, from March 2019 to June 2020, focusing on analysis and deployment of neuroimaging data collections, including EEG and fNIRs in distinct modalities.
Organízate para el trabajo remoto
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#TelegramGate.
Social Network Analysis during Summer of 2019 Protests that led to the ouster of Dr. Ricardo Rosselló as Governor of Puerto Rico. Pre-print available as: Engaging for Puerto Rico: #RickyRenuncia (and #RickySeQueda) during El Verano del 19 and digital identities.
Student Government
As Secretary General of the island-wide confederacy uniting the leadership of the General Student Councils of the 11 campuses that comprise the University of Puerto Rico system for the strategic advancement of systemic changes, and President of the General Student Council of UPR Cayey, I led the body in its plan to consolidate informative resources to all Student Councils, projected to permit stronger and quicker push-throughs of student agendas at all levels of government. Student Body organization included National Assembly of over 10,000 students.
Titan’s atmosphere and why we’re all problem-solvers.
Public talk invited by the British Council and NASA, at the Carnegie Institution for Science, after winning the Caribbean Regional of FameLab International. Inspired by my work in Direct Ab initio molecular dynamics and electronic structure computations of small molecules relevant in the astrochemistry of Titan’s atmosphere under the supervision of Dr. Juan Manuel López-Encarnación at UPR Cayey.
The intuitive derivation of a model for Glucose-Insulin Dynamics.
My first paper, produced during my time at the BioMat Lab in UPR-Cayey under the supervision of Dr. Maytée Cruz-Aponte. Published as Development of a computational model of glucose toxicity in the progression of diabetes mellitus in Mathematical Biosciences and Engineering.