Dr. Arguello became a program director in the Division of Genome Sciences at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) in 2022. His interests involve the relationship between genetic variation and phenotypic variation at various scales of biological organization, from cells and tissues to individuals and populations. He believes that nothing in genetic epidemiology makes sense except in the light of population genetics. Dr. Arguello has an investigator-initiated portfolio focused on population genetics, genomic variation and statistical genomics. He is also part of the NHGRI team for the Human Genome Reference Program (HGRP) and Developmental Genotype-Tissue Expression (dGTEx) initiatives as well as the trans-NIH BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network (BICAN) team.
Dr. Arguello joined the NIH in 2017 as a program officer in the Genomics Research Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). At the NIMH he was a program director of the PsychENCODE Consortium and oversaw programs in functional genomics and statistical and computational methods development. Prior to NIH, he was a senior scientific editor at the leading neuroscience research journal Nature Neuroscience, where he handled diverse scientific areas including the genetics and genomics of brain disorders.
Dr. Arguello received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and his postdoctoral training from Princeton University. He’s a staunch advocate of open science and enhancing research rigor, reproducibility and responsibility. He spends a lot of time thinking about the sociology and philosophy of science and what it means to do good science and be a good scientist.
