I'm currently an Investment Associate at PsyMed Ventures where we're investing in and building the future of brain health!
My previous venture experience was as a Diligence Consultant and Venture Fellow with Breakout Ventures, working on the next generation of creative biosciences.
I grew up down in Miami, and attended U Miami for my B.S. in biomedical engineering.
I'm wrapping up my Ph.D. in biomedical engineering at BU, with a focus in computational neuroscience, defending in the early half of this year.
My first jump into biotech and the Boston innovation ecosystem was with Boston chapter of Nucleate, where I directed the Communications Team. I was also Student Analyst in the BU Office of Technology Development.
from left to right: still frame of recording field of view, extracted neuron bodies, neurons sorted into patterns represented by color credit: NDL
My current research is in Neuroscience at the Neuronal Dynamics Laboratory. I use machine learning algorithms to study the dynamics of neurons forming networks in different contexts. These algorithms are able to take activity from 100s of neurons in a recording and reduce them to a series of predominant
patterns of activity. I then use these patterns to design more rigorous and nuanced analysis frameworks that characterize the dyanamics of these networks while considering every single neuron recorded without losing information to averaging.
Selected Publications:
D Carbonero, J Noueihed, JF Norman, CV Gabel, MA Kramer, JA White, "CaNetiCs - An Open-Source Toolbox for Standardized Dimensionality Reductive Analysis of Neuronal Calcium Activity" (in preparation)
D Carbonero, J Noueihded, JA White, “Non-Negative Matrix Factorization for Analyzing Neuronal Network Dynamics in Calcium Recordings” Scientific Reports
ED Schlafly, D Carbonero, CJ Chu, MA Kramer, "A data augmentation procedure to improve detection of spike ripples in brain voltage recordings" Neuroscience Research
Organs-on-Chips
from left to right: neurosphere, myotubes with cell nuclei, overlap of neurosphere axons innervating myotubes credit: PMLab
My previous work was in Organ-on-Chips in the Physiomimetic Microsystems Laboratory. Organ-on-chips are platforms that create more physologically relevant organ subsystems or accurate, patient specific, disease modeling and efficient drug discovery and screening.
I developed automated, user-friendly, software to analyze fluorescent images taken of these platforms. This analysis pipeline would allow for quantification of platform performance in a consistent and tedium-free pipeline.
Selected Publications:
RR Besser, AC Bowles, A Alassaf, D Carbonero, R Maciel, M Saporta, A Agarwal, “A Chemically Defined Media for Culture of C2C12 Skeletal Muscle and Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Derived Spinal Spheroids” Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering, 13 (6), 605-619
RR Besser, AC Bowles, A Alassaf, D Carbonero, I Claure, E Jones, J Reda, L Wubker, W Batchelor, N Ziebarth, R Silvera, A Khan, R Maciel, M Saporta, A Agarwal: “Enzymatically Crosslinked Gelatin-Laminin Hydrogels for Applications in Neuromuscular Tissue Engineering”, Biomaterials Science, 8(2), 591-606 HIGHLIGHTED AS COVER ARTICLE
A Alassaf, G Tansik, V Mayo, L Wubker, D Carbonero, A Agarwal: “Engineering Anisotropic Cardiac Monolayers on Microelectrode Arrays for Non-invasive Analyses of Electrophysiological Properties” Analyst, 145(1), 139-140 included in themed collection on bioanalytical tools for enabling precision medicine
M Ishahak, L Birman, D Carbonero, J Hill, A Hernandez, S Rawal, A Agarwal: “Integrated platform for operating and interrogating organs-on-chips”, Analytical Methods, 11(43), 5645-5651 (2019) highlighted in the Emerging Investigator Series
For a complete list of publications and more detailed research descriptions please see my CV!
Hobbies
Music
I love all things music, but definitely prefer EDM and latin music. For more albums, playlists, or recommendations, check out my Spotify, or a few selected playlists below:
Latin
Trance
House
Reading
When I'm not reading biotech or neuroscience, astrophysics is my guilty pleasure, but I also enjoy math and other science non-fiction, with the occasional hard sci-fi.
Baseball
I played baseball forever growing up, and still easily watch 100 games a season. The analytical approach baseball has adopted over the last decade makes for fun quantitative experimenting.
Automation
I find it really gratifying to build hardware or software that makes life a little easier.
I build most autiomations in python, and occasionally design and fab (CAD, Rapid-Prototyping)
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