Dr. Paul Cardenas Aldaz

Doctor Paul Cardenas is a PhD student in the Molecular Genetics and Genomics group at the National Heart and Lung Institute (NHLI).

Doctor Cardenas obtained his Medical Doctor degree with honours at the Central University in Ecuador (2006). In 2006, he was awarded a studentship from the San Francisco de Quito University, with which he undertook the Masters in Microbiology Program (degree awarded in 2008); he was focused in the analysis of nosocomial acquired infectious diseases using bacterial genotyping methods. During this time he also was awarded for a Pharmacogenomics Fellowship training in the Sao Paulo University, Brazil.

Since 2008, he is involved in a Wellcome Trust funded birth cohort study, ECUAVIDA in Ecuador, set up with the purpose of investigate the early environmental exposures associated with the development of atopic disease and asthma. In 2009, he got a prestigious Fellowship to visit the Molecular Genetics and Genomics group at NHLI founded by the GABRIEL project. During his Fellowship he investigated the differences in pulmonary microbiota of infants from the Tropics of Ecuador, and the differences in gene expression profiles (transcriptomics) examining the impact of migration on asthma risk. In 2009, he got a Wellcome Trust scholarship, with which he carried out the Masters in Molecular Medicine at Imperial College, obtaining the MSc degree with Distinction honours.

In 2010, Doctor Cardenas was awarded with the NHLI Foundation Studentship to continue with the PhD training in the laboratory of Professors Bill Cookson and Miriam Moffatt at the NHLI, his current research area is profiling the airways' bacterial microbiota using the new generation sequencing techniques. He is comparing the microbiota patterns between healthy and asthmatic children from the tropics of Ecuador, trying to characterize the protective and pathogenic airways' bacteria, and to validate the Hygiene hypothesis of asthma and atopy.