Sergio Alejandro Gómez Ochoa

Biography

After graduating as a physician in 2018, I completed a master's degree in bioinformatics and biostatistics while working on heart failure and Chagas disease at the Fundación Cardiovascular de Colombia. There, my research focused on circulating and imaging biomarkers for predicting adverse outcomes in Chagas cardiomyopathy, as well as transcriptomic and metabolomic profiling of cardiac tissue and peripheral blood to dissect the pathophysiological mechanisms unique to this condition. I began my PhD at Heidelberg University in late 2022, where I work on the molecular basis of cardiac disease using multi-omic approaches, including single-cell transcriptomics and genomics. Through my collaboration with the Saez-Rodriguez group, I develop frameworks for projecting multicellular gene expression programs identified in tissue biopsies onto circulating proteomic signatures, with the goal of translating organ-level biology into non-invasively derived interpretable signatures for chronic diseases.

Research Interests

My research sits at the intersection of tissue biology and clinical translation. I am interested in how the immune system drives cardiac damage and how modifiable molecular mechanisms can be identified to slow the progression of heart failure, with a particular focus on Chagas cardiomyopathy, a neglected cause of heart failure in Latin America. More broadly, I work on methods to bridge high-resolution tissue modalities with accessible clinical readouts such as plasma proteomics and cardiac imaging, aiming to provide both mechanistic insight and clinically actionable stratification tools.

Professional Career

Education

Contact Information