Dr. Julio A. Freyre-González was born in Veracruz, México. He was awarded a B.Sc. in Computer Systems Engineering from the Veracruz Institute of Technology (ITVer) in 2000, a M.Sc. in Computer Science (Machine Learning) from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) in 2001, and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry (Computational Genomics) from the National Autonomous University of México (UNAM) in 2009. Afterwards, he spent three years as post-doctoral researcher, first at the Institute of Biotechnology and then at the Center for Genomic Sciences (CCG), both research facilities of UNAM. In 2012 he became part of the Evolutionary Genomics Program at the Center for Genomic Sciences. During his master’s studies he developed a Bayesian methodology for behavioral cloning, which is a method to construct automatic control systems for complex tasks by capturing and reproducing human subcognitive skills in a computer program. After being impressed by problems on genomics and systems biology, he decided to go deeper in the field by studying a Ph.D. in Biochemistry. Then he turned his attention to the application of graph theory to study the topological properties and the modular and hierarchical organization of the transcriptional regulatory network of Escherichia coli. His work was a fundamental contribution to the first modular analysis of a bacterial regulatory network. During his doctoral research, he developed the foundations of the natural decomposition approach, a biological-mathematical framework that exploits the structural properties of regulatory networks to provide objective criteria enabling their decomposition. Dr. Freyre-González has been awarded various prizes since he was an undergraduate, being some of them the 1st Young Software National Prize by the Arturo Rosenblueth Foundation in 1992, the 13th Young Talent in Life Sciences Prize (XIII Prêmio Jovem Talento em Ciências da Vida) by the Brazilian Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (SBBq) and GE Healthcare Life Sciences in 2009, and the Morelos State Research Merit Award by the Government of Morelos in 2010. He has been invited by the National Council for Science and Technology of México (Conacyt) and the Administrative Department of Science, Technology, and Innovation of Colombia (Colciencias) to evaluate grant applications. He has also evaluated book proposals for Springer. During 2001 and 2002, he was member of the taskforce responsible for designing curricula and syllabuses in computer science and mathematics for the projected creation of an undergraduate program in genomic sciences (UPGS-UNAM), the first on this area in Latin America, at the CCG. Since 2003, he has been responsible for implementing and overseeing syllabuses for the “Programming Principles” and “Scientific Computing” courses, successfully covering topics as design and analysis of algorithms, procedural programming, data structures, dynamic memory management, numerical analysis, and object oriented programming, among others, in only two semesters. Eventually, he also designed and implemented the syllabus for the “Systems Biology” course in 2005. To date he has taught these courses to nearly 200 students distributed in more than ten generations.

Genetics