Roberto C. López-Rivera

Roberto C. López-Rivera, BS

Short Biography

My name is Roberto C. López Rivera, I was born and raised in San Juan Puerto Rico. I'm a computer science undergraduate student, I began doing research with Humberto in January 25, 2019. This summer of 2019 I went to an internship in Pittsburgh as part of the iBRIC research program where I worked with Dr. Sofia triantafillou, PhD. Because I still didn't have much experience doing research she assigned me a proyect where I trained a logistic regression model to predict wheather or not a patient had diabetes by using his Bulk RNA-sequence. I'll leave the abstract of the project here below for you to read if you are interested. This semester I hope to learn more and finally be able to work in a real proyect along side Humberto and my other lab partners.

Abstract:

Cell type composition of a tissue is important for disease identification and treatment decisions. Single cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) is a gold standard for obtaining this information but is very costly and computationally expensive. Bulk RNA-seq data are easily accessible, but do not provide the cell type composition of the tissue. MuSiC is a deconvolution method that estimates cell type proportions in bulk RNA-seq data using already existing scRNA-seq data. In this work we examine how estimates of cell type proportions obtained by MuSiC in bulk RNA-seq data improves classification of diabetic vs non-diabetic patients compared to only using the bulk RNA-seq data. To do so we use machine learning models with and without MuSiC features and compare their cross-validated performance. Improved performance indicates that cell proportions obtained with MuSiC in readily available bulk RNA-seq can be used to improve the quality of models that can detect disease and guide treatment.

Additional Need-To-Know Information

  • I consider myself a funny person, my humor consists of dark humor and irony in society.
  • I realized I'm awkward :cry: but I try to not be! :smile:
  • I'm trying to find what I want to do with my life, so I'm always open to new ideas.
  • If you see me in person you will probably see me smiling, at this point it's not even that I'm happy it's just muscle memory.
  • If you need help with anything you can ask me and we will both google the solution.
  • Friends call me Gibby.

Contact Info

phone: (787) 249-5940 e-mail: roberto.lopez16@upr.edu | alt: rclr0325@gmail.com
github: https://github.com/RLopez18

Research Goals

  • Under construction...

Status

Semester 2018 January - May:

2019.28.01
Reading scientific journals for my lab meeting presentation feb 22,2019
2019.25.02
Learning how to use Julia and working with the polyester libary with Briknie Baez
2019.05.03
I'll change from specific day status update to a weekly better structured type of update.

Week Mar 4 - Mar 8/2019

  • Almost finished reading "The Cartoon Guide to Genetics" with hopes that it will help me understand better the biology part of the research.
  • Started doing the escambron protocols tutorial.
  • Will follow Angel's advice on setting a goal each week.
  • Current goal: Finish atleast the second part of the tutorial.

Week Mar 11 - 15/2019

  • Finished "The Cartoon Guide to Genetics"
  • Studying for Abstract Algebras exam next week
  • Boqueron is tripping :cry: :cry: :cry:

Week Mar 25 - 30/2019

  • Started watching this bioinformatics introductory videos, they are pretty good. Here is the playlist link: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2mpR0RYFQsBiCWVJSvVAO3OJ2t7DzoHA Enjoy! :smile:

Week April 1 - 5/2019

  • Preparing for a CIBI presentation on Thrusday...
  • Still working on polyester...

Semester 2019 August - December

Week 16 - 20/Sep/2019

  • Reading the paper "Deep Learning to Analyze RNA-Seq Gene Expression Data". I'm making the presentation for next friday.

Week 23 - 27/Sep/2019

  • I presented the paper "Deep Learning to Analyze RNA-Seq Gene Expression Data".
  • I started working in the DECEP, apperently I'm suppose to build an attendace app that works with qr codes. :cry:
  • I finally have a proyect! Use the databases that were used in the paper that I presented and use the clinical data to train a DNN to be able to classify distant metastasis cancers. <--- Bad explanation :smile:

Week 30 - 4/Oct/2019

  • This week has been a hastle, I'm overwhelmed by my job and school work plus the lab work. So I decided to catch up with all of my school work and then focus on work-work and lab-work at the same time. So my priority is school-work this week.
  • I generated a self-signed SSL certificate for my app's page. :smile:

Weeks 18 - 27/Nov/2019

  • This past month I haven't really done much with the investigation project but, I've began to work on it. My progress up until now is that I'm cleaning the clinical data, and filtering it as well. That's about it. :smile: