Dr. Ricardo Hernandez ’20

Looking back on his four years as a student at Presbyterian College, Dr. Ricardo Hernandez ‘20 says that PC helped him grow to limits that he never could have imagined. 

Hernandez was the first computational biology student at Presbyterian College to pursue—and ultimately achieve—his Ph.D. As an undergrad, he completed SCINBRE research that studied the fractal properties of the genome as a novel way to identify how similar, at the DNA level, different organisms are.

“DNA has fractal properties, which means that there is a constant presence of repeating patterns and self-similarity,” says Hernandez “Therefore, by elucidating these patterns, we could ask the question: how similar are the patterns from these different organisms?”

Hernandez says that his undergraduate research benefited him greatly as his career unfolded. He went on to achieve his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina and is currently a PRISM Baker Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University researching Alzheimer’s disease, co-mentored by Professor Chaitan Khosla and Michael Greicius, M.D. 

“Thanks to [my undergraduate] research, I learned how to code and ‘speak’ multiple coding languages. This research was on a very complex topic in an area outside my expertise, such as physics. This was very useful during my Ph.D. where I was able to find ways to apply my knowledge and skills to a wide range of different topics.”