New seminar run by the StaPa: "Understanding Down syndrome as an Interferonopathy: a scientific journey"

On July 3, the Institut Pasteur's association for young researchers, StaPa, is running a seminar entitled "Understanding Down syndrome as an Interferonopathy: a scientific journey" led by Dr. Joaquin Espinosa.

Dr. Espinosa is the Executive Director of the Linda Crnic Institute for Down Syndrome. He is also a Professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine, the co-Leader of the Molecular Oncology program at the University of Colorado Cancer Center, and the founding Director of the Functional Genomics Facility at the University of Colorado.

He received his B.S. in Biology from the Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, Argentina and a PhD in Biology from the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. He completed his postdoctoral training at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California.

In his talk, Joaquin will discuss about his scientific and personal journey from his undergraduate work in Argentina to his current role as the Executive Director of the only academic home for Down syndrome research, the Linda Crnic Institute at the University of Colorado.
He will illustrate key steps in his career and highlight the importance of collaboration, naiveté and intellectual cross-pollination. He will then talk about his research on Down syndrome, and the discovery that this condition could be understood in large measure as an Interferonopathy driven by constitutive activation of the innate immune system. He will present data from The Human Trisome Project, a large cohort study of the population with trisomy 21 including deep clinical characterization and multi-omics datasets, which aims to elucidate why people with Down syndrome are protected from certain conditions, such as cancer, while highly predisposed to others, such as Alzheimer’s disease and autoimmune disorders.

This event will take place on July 3 at the social center "The 25" at 2:00pm.