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José A. Rodriguez
When his parents left their farm in Jalisco, Mexico, and brought their family to the United States, five-year-old José Rodriguez had no thoughts of becoming a research scientist. But 15 years later, as a biophysics student at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Rodriguez excelled and soon learned firsthand what he calls "the powerful potential of using basic science research for biomedical applications."
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José A. Rodriguez
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, CA
Photo: Mark Harmel
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The road from Jalisco to UCLA was not an easy one. While his family obtained U.S. citizenship, Rodriguez learned English and developed a taste for learning. By the time he reached high school, he was gobbling up advanced placement science and math classes, while working as a busboy 20 hours a week.
Most of his high school classmates didn't make it to college, but Rodriguez gained admission to UCLA. While there, he was awarded the Dean's Prize for Undergraduate Research and a prize for the best oral presentation by a senior trainee in the National Institutes of Health's Minority Access to Research Careers Program.
The summer after his sophomore year, he had his first chance to conduct independent research through HHMI's Exceptional Research Opportunities Program (EXROP), which offers research experiences for disadvantaged and minority undergraduates. He worked under the tutelage of David Schatz at Yale University School of Medicine. Rodriguez studied how certain proteins contribute to the high frequency of mutations during the development of antibody-producing immune cells—a process known as somatic hypermutation.
Schatz, an HHMI investigator, recalled that a few weeks into the program, Rodriguez proposed a new experiment based on the idea that the function of activation-induced deaminase (AID) is regulated during the cell cycle. AID is an enzyme crucial for initiating the process of somatic hypermutation, but its regulation is poorly understood. "There wasn't enough time to complete the research over the summer, but the mere fact that José suggested it showed extraordinary motivation and intuition, not to mention confidence," said Schatz. "You could easily imagine him as the director of a lab, driving research for years to come."
With a strong grounding in mathematics and physics, Rodriguez wants to help find new ways to build bridges between physics, engineering, and medicine. "I hope to help channel the current explosion of technological innovation into the field of biomedical research," he explained.
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