Valenzuela-Ponce, José Humberto

Dr. Humberto Valenzuela Ponce is a biologist who graduated from the Faculty of Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where he also earned his Doctorate in Biomedical Sciences with Honors from the Faculty of Medicine. His academic journey includes research stays at the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS (Vancouver, Canada) and the Fred Hutch Cancer Center (Division of Vaccine and Infectious Diseases, Seattle, USA). Since 2012, he has served as a Medical Sciences Researcher at the Center for Research in Infectious Diseases (CIENI) of the National Institute of Respiratory Diseases (INER) Ismael Cosio Villegas. He is a member of the National System of Researchers (Level 1, since 2019) and belongs to the American Society of Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics (ASHI) and the International AIDS Society (IAS). Dr. Valenzuela has extensive experience in the immunogenetics of disease progression caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), focusing on the correlates of protection and/or risk of class I HLA loci in mestizo populations of Mexico and Central America. He is currently investigating the responses of CD8+ T lymphocytes restricted by HLA variants commonly expressed in mestizos from Latin America, with particular attention to viral genome sites where Amerindian HLAs influence population-level evolution. Since 2023, Dr. Valenzuela has also been teaching Human Genetics and Cellular/Molecular Mechanisms as an adjunct professor at the School of Medicine and Health Sciences (EMCS, Basic Sciences).