Dr. Velazquez-Villarreal is a physician-scientist, surgeon, and computational geneticist specializing in cancer genomics, cancer disparities, precision medicine, computational genetics, and artificial intelligence. He is faculty at the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center, where his lab focuses on spatial multiomics tumor profiling in colorectal cancer. A pioneer in conversational AI for oncology, he develops natural language agents that integrate clinical, genomic, and social determinants of health data, enabling real-time, user-friendly precision oncology for colorectal cancer. He earned his PhD in human/medical genetics from the University of Pittsburgh while conducting high-performance computing research at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center–Carnegie Mellon University. He completed postdoctoral training at The Scripps Research Institute and Rady Children’s Hospital–San Diego, and holds additional graduate degrees in Statistics, Computational Science, and Big Data. His medical training at UANL in Mexico includes surgical fellowships in the Department of Surgery at Hospital Universitari Vall d’Hebron in Barcelona, Spain, and at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School in Boston. An NIH-, NCI-, and NIA-funded investigator, he leads and collaborates on multiple federal and academic grants in the U.S., including NCI Moonshot initiatives that advance the AI-driven integration of Spatial Multiomics, Microbiome, Social Determinants of Health, and Clinical data.
