Román Ramos Báez
He/They
I am queer and I am a molecular biologist.//
At my core, I am always looking for ways in which I can have positive impacts on the world around me. At times, I have felt that the societal impacts of my basic biology work build slowly and often in indirect ways. However, I can have immediate and powerful impacts on the world through my interactions with other people. I have done a lot of work to mentor scientists one-on-one in the lab, teach, and otherwise put myself out there as a possibility model for immigrants, scientists, and queer people. Laterly, I have been able to work directly with academic society leadership and government representatives to push for changes in policy and structures that bring in scientists from historically excluded backgrounds and make science less biased and more impactful. Ultimately, I love plants because I love people. Understanding plants allows me to better understand the people that have domesticated them, grown them, or otherwise have close relationships with them. I will always find ways to have an impact on people through my science.
Over the last ten years, I have spent much of my research focused on understanding hormone signaling pathways in plants. Auxin is a hormone that regulates almost every growth and developmental process in plants, yet the core pathways that regulate auxin signaling and its transcriptional responses is very well conserved across all plants. This pathway has been used to engineer a number of different tools that allow scientists to collect data on plant responses, engineer the growth and development of plants, and even to regulate gene expression in mammalian and yeast systems. My work both continues to expand on our knowledge about how auxin responses work and evolve, and engineers new molecular biology tools that build on that information.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rramosbaez/ https://bsky.app/profile/sensitiveroots.bsky.social