A
s a Harvard undergraduate, Daniel
Colón-Ramos explored the forests
of Panama and Honduras, listening
closely as indigenous people described how
they use medicinal plants to treat ill individ-
uals. The interactions, he says, left him with
many more questions than answers. “The
questions that kept coming to my mind were
molecular questions about what the bioac-
tive agents were and how they worked,” he
says. Sitting there in the forest, he realized
he wanted to contribute knowledge to science,
instead of just learning facts.After earning his bachelor’s degree in
biology in 1998, he moved to Duke University,
where he began a post-baccalaureate program
that gave him his first experiences at the lab
bench. “That was transformative in my ability
to imagine myself as a scientist,” he says. He
then applied to and was accepted as a PhD
student at Duke, where he joined the lab of
Sally Kornbluth, who studies cell suicide,
a process called apoptosis. Colón-Ramos
identified viral peptides that inhibited trans-
lation of RNA into host cell proteins that
would otherwise induce apoptosis, revealing
a potential mechanism that viruses use to
continue their cell-to-cell spread.
Those experiments, together with attending
talks and reading papers outside of his com-
fort zone, helped Colón-Ramos pinpoint what
sparked his scientific curiosity: how cellular
organization shapes the way an organism
behaves. Colón-Ramos wanted to explore
this connection in an animal model that
could easily be modified genetically,
which led him to the worm Caenorhabditis
elegans. As a postdoctoral researcher, he
also shifted his research focus from cell
death to developmental neuroscience,
joining Kang Shen’s lab at Stanford
University. There, Colón-Ramos showed
that non-neuronal cells called glia guide
synapse formation and coordinate
neural connectivity (Science, 318:103–
106, 2007).
Less than a year after publishing
the discovery, Colón-Ramos opened
his lab at Yale University to further
explore how synapses form, persist,
and govern behavior. He’s using C.
elegans to dissect cell biology, “but
also he has stayed true to himself and
expanded his interest in behavior,”
Shen says. In 2018, Colón-Ramos’s
postdoc Josh Hawk reported that a
single cell in the worm’s nervous sys-
tem serves as a logic system controlling
how the animal senses temperature andresponds to it based on a memory it made
before (Neuron, 97:356-367.e4). “We’re
showing that these neurons can be molecu-
lar computers,” Colón-Ramos says. “They’re
capable of pretty sophisticated integration.”
For Colón-Ramos, though, studying a
single neuron is not enough. He wants to
understand all of the neuronal connections
of the brain, what’s called the connectome. In
a multi-institutional effort, he and colleagues
traced C. elegans connectomes to see which
cells interact during development. “From
that work emerged all sorts of circuits, some
of which we knew, but [also] others which we
had overlooked,” Colón-Ramos says. Delving
into the developmental connectomics of C.
elegans is not an easy feat, says Hari Shroff, a
biophysicist at National Institute of Biomedical
Imaging and Bioengineering who is part of the
connectome collaboration. But Colón-Ramos
has this “willingness to be fearless and try
new technology, while also being critical and
honest about limitations,” Shroff says.
That honesty has paid off in Colón-
Ramos’s research as well as in his advocacy
for representation of minorities in the
sciences. Born and raised in Puerto Rico,
Colón-Ramos became acutely aware of
the lack of diversity in science as an under-
graduate. “Not only did I not see myself
represented in the sciences, but a lot of
people had not met people from my back-
ground,” he says.
Colón-Ramos founded CienciaPR, a non-
profit organization that brings Hispanic
and Latinx communities together to pro-
mote scientific research and education.
“He actually does want to make science a
diverse place,” Shroff says. Shen adds that
Colón-Ramos’s incredible passion for out-
reach is part of what sets him apart, along
with his ability to establish collaborations
and his outstanding science. “He seems to
have this sort of energy to get it all done,”
Shen says. “[His] success already speaks
for itself.”gSCIENTIST TO WATC HDaniel Colón-Ramos: C. elegans Psychologist
© CHRISTOPHER BEAUCHAMP PHOTOGRAPHY
speaks51Professor of cellular neuroscience, Yale University, Age: 44BY CLAUDIA LOPEZ-LLOREDA05.2020 | THE SCIENTIST 51