Diego A. Vargas

Diego Vargas is a biomedical engineer curious about the emergence of complex behavior from simpler components, particularly in cell biology.

He began doing research as an engineering student when he was absorbed by the amount of detail contained in a single molecular dynamics simulation. This motivated him to pursue a Ph.D. in cell migration in the context of metastasis. He worked together with the engineering department and medical center at Boston University to better understand the role of protein N-glycosylation in collective cell migration. He built a multiscale computational model of an invading cellular cluster in 3D in which individual cell adhesion is determined by intracellular pathway regulation in real-time.

Before joining Dewpoint, he was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at KU Leuven where he learned to integrate cellular forces into his models. Analyzing the spatiotemporal evolution of cellular tractions taught him firsthand the variability in cells that make their study such a challenge.