Principal Investigators

Dr. García-Arrarás is Professor in Biology who has been at UPR for 35 years. At different times he has held various administrative positions including Department Chair and Coordinator of the Graduate Program. He has been continuously involved in undergraduate student training via training programs such as NIH-MBRS, MARC or NSF AMP and REU. At present he is the P.I. of two different programs: an NSF research program to provide post-bac students meaningful experiences in research and professional development, and an NIH-ENDURE training program to train undergraduates for careers in Neuroscience. Dr. García-Arrarás is not only well qualified as an administrator but has also been a highly successful mentor. He has mentored hundreds of students, mostly Hispanic and many of them women. Many of his publications include undergraduate student authors. Students in his lab have continued graduate programs in top-tier universities including Harvard, Yale, Univ. of Pennsylvania, Univ. of Washington, UC San Francisco, UC Berkeley, among many others. Similarly, students from his lab have been accepted to prestigious MD/PhD programs at Columbia, Univ Minnesota, Baylor and others. Although Dr. García-Arrarás original training was in Human Physiology, his research has moved with the scientific advancements, and he is now fully immersed in the field of genomics. His latest publications attest to this successful transition: several papers on transcriptomics, a study of the intestinal microbiome (Pagan-Jimenez et al.2019), and a draft genome of his research model organism, the sea cucumber Holothuria glaberrima. (MedinaFeliciano et al. 2021). One of the ongoing projects in his lab is a collaboration with Dovetail Genomics to fully sequence the holothurian model genome. The manuscript on this genome will be coming out early next year.