Daniel Colón-Ramos

Colón-Ramos was born and raised in Puerto Rico, growing up between the towns of Barranquitas and Guaynabo. He studied elementary school in Colegio Mater Salvatoris and high school in Colegio San Ignacio de Loyola. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard University in 1998. During his undergraduate career, he pursued research projects, such as studying the use of medicinal plants among indigenous Central American communities with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI).[1] He then worked as a research assistant, with the support of an NIH Diversity Supplement, in Dr. Mariano García-Blanco's laboratory at Duke University.[2] There, he studied how the architecture of the nucleus of the algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii changes to affect cytoplasmic events, such as transcript localization.[3] He then stayed at Duke to pursue his PhD in the laboratory of cell biologist Sally Kornbluth. For his doctoral work, Colón-Ramos studied the molecular mechanisms underlying programmed cell death, or apoptosis, and identified a viral family of proteins that induce apoptosis, which are similar to the so-called "Reaper" proteins first identified in fruit flies.[4] He also found that these proteins operate by regulating protein translation, directly binding to the ribosomes—which are the cellular machinery that translate RNA messages into protein products—to alter their assembly.[5] He completed his dissertation "The reaper tales: molecular mechanism of inhibition of translation and induction of apoptosis by a novel family of reaper-like proteins" in 2003.[6] He dedicated his thesis dissertation "To those who could have done a better job than I, but never received the opportunities...may they (one day) receive the opportunities to share their knowledge and their skills in a society w/o prejudices".

Following his PhD, Colón-Ramos moved to California in 2004 to pursue a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscientist Kang Shen's laboratory as a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation fellow, with the additional support of a National Institutes of Health "Pathways to Independence" award.[7] There, he shifted his research focus to studying the developmental neurobiology of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. To understand how synapses are established and modified to form memories over the course of the worm's life, he established a system to track synapses over the worms development using cellular markers. Using this system, he found that glial cells provide a roadmap for these connections to be made through the signaling molecule netrin.[8]

In 2008, Colón-Ramos became an assistant professor at Yale University School of Medicine. In 2013, he was promoted to associate professor, and in 2019 to full professor. His research centers on the underlying mechanisms that allow animals to form memories. Specifically, his research group studies how connections between neurons, otherwise known as the synapses, are precisely made to build the right neuronal architecture, how they are maintained and how they are modified to code a particular behavior or memory. To understand how neurons find and connect to each other in the right way, his group uses the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans as a model system.[9] His laboratory has developed genetic screens to identify pathways through which synapses are formed, as well as techniques to re-route how pathways are formed by manipulating single cells to track how those changes influence behavior.[1]

In collaboration with William A. Mohler at University of Connecticut Health Center, Zhirong Bao at Sloan Kettering Institute, and Hari Shroff at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, Colón-Ramos has developed a mobile application and collaborative platform called WormGUIDES to act as a systems-level resource to track and detail neuronal connections in the nematode worm.[10] The resource uses a combination of microscopy and single-cell tracking technologies to record the decisions of embryonic neurons of the nematode worm over the course of development. The effort, funded by the National Institutes of Health, aims to catalyze the development of new technologies for advancing neuroscience research, while building a platform for knowledge sharing to build a neurodevelopmental atlas mapping all the nematode cells during development.[11]

In 2018, Colón-Ramos received a "High-Risk, High Reward" grant from the National Institutes of Health to better understand how energy is produced within neurons to power brain functions, which include memory formation and behavior.[12] He holds an appointment at Marine Biological Laboratory and is an adjunct professor at the Instituto de Neurobiología José del Castillo, University of Puerto Rico.[13]

• Elected Member, National Academy of Medicine, 2020[23]
• NIH Pioneer Award, 2018[12]
• NINDS Landis Award for Outstanding Mentorship, 2018[24]
• Howard Hughes Medical Institute Faculty Scholar, 2016[25]
• E. E. Just Lecture Award, American Society for Cell Biology, 2016[26]
• Early Career Award for Public Engagement with Science, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2011[18]
• Sloan Research Fellow, 2010[27]
• Klingenstein Fellowship Award in the Neurosciences, 2009[28]