joel rodriguez medina

joelrome88 {at} gmail {dot} com

Hi!
I'm Joel and I love using computers, logic, and data 💻 📊 to solve problems.

During my PhD, my research focused in understanding how plants 🌱 regulate their genomes 🧬 in response to their environment.

As an Insight Health Data Science fellow, I created SuppSmart: a recommendation system to suggest dietary supplements based on an user’s search query. Try it out here!

Now I'm working at Foodome, where I'm developing tools to understand the relationship between plants as food and our health.

about me

I use programming and data science to answer questions about biology. I also like to write, draw, and teaching principles of data literacy by coding. I helped to teach and develop material to teach an undergrad course at UC Davis called Genome Hunters. We taught undergrads principles of bioinformatics in a project-based course. Students isolated salt-tolerant microbes and send their genomes for sequencing. In the class students learned data-driven approaches to test hypothesis. This resulted in a publication that was featured as a the Microbiology Resource of the Month .
In 2018 I was selected into the ASPB Conviron Scholars Program aimed to support the early career of students of plant sciences. During this program I wrote a piece about genome editing in plants aimed for a general audience. My piece was featured in the Twitter feed of the program and you can read it here: