From moonlighting as a salsa dancer to conducting epidemiological studies, Miguel Paredes (he/him) is all about community. He decided to enter the field of science when he was in high school at the encouragement of his high school science teacher, the first Latino he met with a Ph.D. Now a genomic epidemiologist at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center and clinician in training at the University of Washington, he’s hoping to conduct research that is done by and for marginalized groups to which he belongs.
“The main reason why some public health interventions fail is we don’t really think about community that often,” he says. “As both a Latino immigrant and as a queer man, there’s very few things that are more important to me than community.”
As a genomic epidemiologist, Paredes assembles family trees of viruses and other pathogens to see where, and how quickly, they can travel. Last year, he published work detailing the spread of mpox across the globe, an outbreak that predominantly affected men who have sex with men. He and his colleagues observed that mpox infections began to decrease before the majority of those at high risk had gotten a vaccine — pointing to the importance of behavioral changes in reducing the spread of the virus.
Doing research to show how members of the queer community came together to protect each other “was a really cool moment” he says. “Seeing the results of those models and seeing how much it lined up with my experiences being part of the queer community, felt a little bit like a love letter to the queer community.”
—Anil Oza
