Jimena Monzon Sandoval

Jimena completed an undergraduate programme in Genomic Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She worked with Dr Humberto Gutierrez during her final year alternating developmental neurobiology with the analysis of transcriptomic data. Jimena then joined Dr Araxi Urrutia at the evolutionary and functional genomics lab, University of Bath, as a PhD student. Her thesis had a particular focus in brain transcriptomic analysis, describing a global change in the coexpression network architecture during normal brain development. In March 2016, Jimena joined Dr Caleb Webber's group as a Career Development Fellow in Bioinformatics where she is responsible for analysing and integrating large scale datasets with the aim to better understand the pathways affected in Parkinson’s disease as well as in cell and animal models of the disease.

Jimena's work is focused on analysing large scale sequencing data generated from tissues/cells from patients with Parkinson’s disease as well as from cellular and animal models of the disease. The main goal of her research is to guide further experiments to better understand and treat the disease. For example, part of Jimena's research consists of detecting genes and pathways that change their expression in particular conditions (i.e. in disease) and among those genes identify pathways and functional gene groups particularly prone to be disturbed in the disease. Jimena has a particular interest in coexpression changes that occur in Parkinson's and other neurodegenerative diseases, that is, how genes present a coordinated pattern of activity only in certain conditions and how this coordination can be disrupted in pathological conditions.