Faculty & Staff

Julio ("Cesar") Espinoza, PhD

J. Cesar Ignacio Espinoza, who joined KGI in September 2023, earned his Bachelor of Science in Biology from the Oaxacan Institute of Technology in Oaxaca, Mexico. He then received his Masters in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Arizona in Tucson. His master’s thesis delved into the evolutionary biology of T4-like phages. After obtaining his Masters, Cesar pursued a PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology with an emphasis on bioinformatics, training within the IGERT Comparative Genomics program. Portions of his doctoral research were published in Nature and Science.

After his PhD, Cesar trained as a postdoctoral fellow at USC, having secured the competitive USC-Provost fellowship. There, he delved into the evolutionary dynamics of marine viruses using -omics and bioinformatic techniques. His work was published in Nature Microbiology.

Before becoming a part of KGI, Cesar had a successful tenure in a couple of startups. Initially, he worked as a Data and Bioinformatics Scientist at Curative, where he established the bioinformatics infrastructure that secured some early contracts. He further established workflows that sequenced, assembled, and annotated over 35,000 SARS-CoV-2 genomes. Post the pandemic, his expertise was channeled towards building fast variant calling workflows for human genome sequencing. After departing from Curative, Cesar joined as a senior engineer at FormBio, contributing significantly to the creation of software designed to analyze NGS data and extract biological insights from it. Cesar is proficient in both AWS and Google Cloud environments.

His research interests sit at the intersection of microbiology, virus-host interactions, bioinformatics, and data science.