Research - Our Team

Juan R Gonzalez is an Associate Research Professor at ISGlobal where leads the Bioinformatic Group in Genetic Epidemiology (BRGE).

He has co-authored more than 150 scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals and has ample experience in large international research projects (ATHLETE, HELIX, MEDIRAD y OPERRA). As an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Mathematics at Autonomous University of Barcelona, his educational activities focus on providing graduate lectures on advanced statistical methods and bioinformatics. After getting his Ph.D. in Biostatistics supervised by Prof. Edsel Peña from University of South Carolina Columbia (USA), he spent two years as a post-doc at Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG).

His work focuses on the development of statistical and computational methods for the analysis and comprehension of different omic data motivated by a wide range of questions of biological and clinical relevance. These include genomic (CNVs, inversions, mosaicisms), transcriptomic (RNA-seq and alternative splicing) and proteomic among others. The analysis of the exposome, its characterization and how to integrate it with different omic layers is also another active line of research of his group.

He is the author of the book “Omic association analysis with R and Bioconductor” which includes up-to-date methods to exploit omic data.

Lines of research

• Statistical methods to exploit genomic data
•  Scalable and robust methods to big data in personalized medicine
•  Role of genomic inversions in complex diseases
•  New statistical methods and tools to analyze exposome data
•  Role of extreme down regulation of chromosome Y in complex diseases

Main publications

• Ruiz-Arenas C, Caceres A, Lopez-Sanchez M, Tolosana I, Perez-Jurado L, Gonzalez JR. scoreInvHap: Inversion genotyping for genome-wide association studies. Plos Genetics. 2019;15(7):e1008203.
•  Hernandez-Ferrer C, Wellenius GA, Tamayo I, Basagana X, Sunyer J, Vrijheid M, Gonzalez JR. Comprehensive study of the exposome and omic data using rexposome Bioconductor packages. Bioinformatics. 2019;pii: btz526. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btz526.
•  Hernandez-Ferrer C, Gonzalez JR. CTDquerier: a bioconductor R package for Comparative Toxicogenomics Database data extraction, visualization and enrichment of environmental and toxicological studies. Bioinformatics. 2018;15;34(18):3235-3237.
•  Caceres A, Gonzalez JR. Following the footprints of polymorphic inversions on SNP data: from detection to association tests. Nucleic Acids Res. 2015;43:e53.
• Gonzalez JR, Caceres A, Esko T, Cusco I, Puig M, Esnaola M, Reina J, SirouxV, Bouzigon E, Nadif R, Reinmaa E, Milani L, Bustamante M, Jarvis D, Anto JM, Sunyer J, Demenais F, Kogevinas M, Metspalu A, Caceres M, Perez-Jurado LA. A common 16p11.2 inversion underlies the joint susceptibility to asthma and obesity. Am J Hum Genet. 2014;94(3):361-72.