Research Interests and Accomplishments

Andres Gomez is a staff scientist in the human biology and genomic medicine departments at the J. Craig Venter institute. He holds a B.Sc. and a M.Sc. both from the National University of Colombia, in animal sciences and biotechnology (microbial ecology) respectively. He received his Ph.D from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and completed postdoctoral work at the University of Minnesota, Twin cities. His research has mainly focused on combining field work and molecular techniques (metagenomics and metabolomics), along with bioinformatics and data mining to study the microbial communities associated to non-human primates and humans, in light of health, disease, ecology and evolution.

Current areas of interest include studying how the gut microbiome and diet have impacted human evolution, exploring the interplay between the environment (ecology), microbes and the host genomic landscape (gene expression) in the human and non-human primate gut, characterizing gut microbiome changes during autoimmune disease and investigating the impact of the microbiome in oral and intestinal health.

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