Marcela Aguilera

GBCB Ph.D Student @ Virginia Tech

My current identification

I am a second year Genetics, Bioinformatics, and Computational Biology (GBCB) Ph.D student at Dr. Boris Vinatzer's Laboratory of Plant & Atmospheric Microbiology & (Meta)Genomics in the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences at Virginia Tech.

Previous to VT I lived in TX for 8 years where I obtained my BS in CS at The University of Texas at San Antonio and my MS in Bioinformatics at The University of Texas at El Paso.

Outside school and the lab I am either trying all sorts of coffee, looking at pictures of dogs online (or my own dog on my phone), reading a novel, lifting weights, practicing taekwondo, or enjoying nature!!

PS. That's my dog COCO in the picture with me

Why do I do what I do?

Ever since I was a kid, I have always been very curious and have always wanted to know how everything works and why. Yes, I was a "WHY" kid :)

Initially, I wanted to contribute to the field of cancer, since this impacted my life when my mom went through treatment when I was a kid, but since I have had the opportunity to explore more areas, my current overall goal is to contribute to the scientific community knowledge and the better understanding of different biological areas, including humans, bacteria, and plants.


How cool is it that I get to explore a tiny little bit of the unknown and say that I contributed to a better understanding of the world with that!?


So, what exactly do I do?

  • I install and run bioinformatics tools on a HPC cluster. It sound simple but this is probably where I spend a lot of time on.
  • Assemble genomes
  • Do plant (tomato and boxwood) pathogen identification from metagenomic read sequences obtained with the Nanopore minION
  • More assemblies of metagenomes
  • Learn CNNs, RNNs, for future applications ;)
  • Read LOTS and LOTS of papers

PS. Not specifically in that order