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Growing up in the city of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, Rogelio A. Hernández-López was engaged in intense training for swimming competitions. He recalls that around the ages of 13–15, his daily routine was a relentless cycle of school, eating meals in the car, a 3 h swimming workout, homework, dinner, and sleep. In a sense, he says, his perseverance and discipline were transmitted from sports to science.
Vitals
Hometown: Oaxaca, Mexico
Education: BS, chemistry, National Autonomous University of Mexico, 2007; MA, chemistry, 2011, and PhD, chemical physics, 2015, Harvard University
Current position: Assistant professor of bioengineering and genetics, Stanford University
Nickname: Rollo, by my swimming team friends
Favorite music: Timba, Latin jazz
Hobbies: Salsa dancing, swimming, enjoying live music
I am: Oaxaqueño, Mexican
And it looks like that devotion to his passions has paid off. Hernández-López sometimes thinks of his group at Stanford University as a team of high-performance athletes, where everyone is constantly training and focused on what they are passionate about. His lab is trying to understand the complex biochemical language that cells use to communicate, knowledge that could be leveraged to genetically program cells to fight disease.
His interest in chemistry emerged from another form of competition: in high school, he quickly rose through local chemistry and math contests, and he ultimately competed at the International Chemistry Olympiad in Athens, Greece. This experience was transformative, he says. It inspired him to pursue a chemistry degree at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
During his undergraduate studies, Hernández-López’s drive didn’t let up. In addition to his required classes, he enrolled in mathematics, physics, and graduate chemistry courses, and he participated in short research projects exploring various areas of chemistry. In 2008, he graduated as the top student in his class.
Inspired by friends who were studying in the US, and because he was curious about doing research in a country with more resources than Mexico, he decided to pursue a doctorate at Harvard University. He admits he had some concerns as he made the move to Boston, including having “to speak English all the time”—a language he had not yet fully mastered.
“He’s pretty fearless about doing new things,” says Andres Leschziner, a structural biologist at the University of California San Diego who was Hernández-López’s PhD adviser at Harvard. “I think everyone wanted to recruit him.” Leschziner was happy when he learned that Hernández-López decided to join his lab.
Specifically, Leschziner admired Hernández-López’s curiosity to learn new methods and apply them to the problem at hand. At Harvard, one of Hernández-López’s goals was to advance the understanding of how dyneins, molecular motors that transport cellular cargoes, move along intracellular highways (Science 2012, DOI: 10.1126/science.1224151). Besides analyzing cryogenic electron microscopy data, he brought his computational skills into Leschziner’s lab and built a molecular model of the interactions involved.
“Rogelio’s expertise in molecular dynamics was key,” Leschziner says. His sophisticated modeling approach provided a more detailed understanding for how the dynein’s foot binds to and detaches from microtubules, which form the track along which dyneins walk, Leschziner explains.
Even with that success, Hernández-López wanted to press beyond what his program demanded. In the middle of his PhD research in biophysics, he took a summer course in physiology at the Marine Biological Laboratory, an experience that guided him toward his lab’s current research questions. “I no longer wanted to study isolated proteins” or just look at interactions between two proteins, he says. “I wanted to do things more on a cellular scale.”
I no longer wanted to study isolated proteins. . . . I wanted to do things more on a cellular scale.
During a postdoctoral fellowship in Wendell Lim’s lab at the University of California, San Francisco, Hernández-López focused on engineering human T cells to modulate how they can tell cancer cells apart from other cells in the body (Science 2021, DOI: 10.1126/science.abc1855). Questions on how cells communicate and interact continue to grip him as he steers the course of his Stanford lab.
By cutting and pasting DNA into T cells’ genomes, his lab aims to reprogram them to fight cancer. Most of the current approaches revolve around the T cells’ ability to kill cells that pose a threat, Hernández-López says, “but we are thinking a lot about how we can make these modified cells talk to other types of cells, maybe to enhance other functions.” For example, his team is interested in programming T cells to improve how they infiltrate a tumor or to extend their lifespan.
Outside the lab, Hernández-López is as tireless about his passions as he was as a kid. He still swims, and he has also become an avid salsa dancer. More formally, though, he has taken it upon himself to empower new generations of scientists.
About a decade ago, he plunged into yet another field where chemists rarely tread: he enrolled in a Harvard course on education, innovation, and social entrepreneurship. There he learned how to better manage a budding nonprofit he’d cofounded, Clubes de Ciencia México, which organizes intensive face-to-face and online science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) activities for high school and college students in Mexico.
Credit: Maria Ximena Natera Cruz
Rogelio A. Hernández-López (left) chats with two members of his team, Julian Perez (center), a genetics PhD student, and Qian Xue (right), a postdoctoral scholar. Perez and Xue participated in Hernández-López's Clubes de Ciencia México program during their summer, teaching science to Mexican students.
The course inspired a new perspective at Clubes de Ciencia. Hernández-López started to structure the project like an educational start-up, in which the team in charge needed to secure financial resources, recruit talent, and convince society and potential allies of the project’s possible impact.
Fast-forward, and the program has crossed borders. Following its success in Mexico, Clubes de Ciencia has been implemented in other Latin American countries under the guidance of Hernández-López and other members of the Mexican team. Throughout this expansion, these mentors “were extremely supportive,” says Bruna Paulsen, a Brazilian stem cell biologist and cofounder of Clubes de Ciência Brasil. Today more than 19,000 students from nine countries have participated in programs under the umbrella organization Science Clubs International.
Hernández-López never anticipated the program’s profound impact. He recently met a Stanford student from Peru who applied to the university because of Science Clubs. He adds that he has heard of many other similar stories of inspired young scientists.
Paulsen, who is currently at the biotech company Gameto in New York City, says that Hernández-López’s success, charisma, and humility make him a role model. “In Latin America, everybody can name a soccer player, but it’s very hard to name scientists,” she says. Science Clubs International aims to change that by showing students they can become scientists too.
Hernández-López does this job very well, Paulsen says. By showing his achievements while remaining approachable, he proves to students that “it’s possible to get where they dream, because someone else was able to.”
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