Daniel Alfonso Colón-Ramos is the McConnell Duberg Professor of Neuroscience and Cell Biology at Yale University School of Medicine, where his lab studies the cell biology of the synapse during development and learning. He is also the founder of the nonprofit organization Ciencia Puerto Rico (CienciaPR), a collaborative network for people interested in science and Puerto Rico. In 2020, he was named to the National Academy of Medicine.
Education & early career
Colón-Ramos was born and raised in Puerto Rico, growing up between the towns of Guaynabo and Barranquitas. He studied elementary school in Colegio Mater Salvatoris and high school in Colegio San Ignacio de Loyola. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard University in 1998. During his undergraduate career, he pursued research projects, such as studying the use of medicinal plants among indigenous Central American communities with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI). He then worked as a research assistant, with the support of an NIH Diversity Supplement, in Dr. Mariano García-Blanco's laboratory at Duke University. There, he studied how the architecture of the nucleus of the algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii changes to affect cytoplasmic events, such as transcript localization. He then stayed at Duke to pursue his PhD in the laboratory of cell biologist Sally Kornbluth. For his doctoral work, Colón-Ramos studied the molecular mechanisms underlying programmed cell death, or apoptosis, and identified a viral family of proteins that induce apoptosis, which are similar to the so-called "Reaper" proteins first identified in fruit flies. He also found that these proteins operate by regulating protein translation, directly binding to the ribosomes—which are the cellular machinery that translate RNA messages into protein products—to alter their assembly. He completed his dissertation "The reaper tales: molecular mechanism of inhibition of translation and induction of apoptosis by a novel family of reaper-like proteins" in 2003. He dedicated his thesis dissertation "To those who could have done a better job than I, but never received the opportunities...may they (one day) receive the opportunities to share their knowledge and their skills in a society w/o prejudices".
Following his PhD, Colón-Ramos moved to California in 2004 to pursue a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscientist Kang Shen's laboratory as a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation fellow, with the additional support of a National Institutes of Health "Pathways to Independence" award. There, he shifted his research focus to studying the developmental neurobiology of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. To understand how synapses are established and modified to form memories over the course of the worm's life, he established a system to track synapses over the worms development using cellular markers. Using this system, he found that glial cells provide a roadmap for these connections to be made through the signaling molecule netrin.
Research
In 2008, Colón-Ramos became an assistant professor at Yale University School of Medicine. In 2013, he was promoted to associate professor, and in 2019 to full professor. His research centers on the underlying mechanisms that allow animals to form memories. Specifically, his research group studies how connections between neurons, otherwise known as the synapses, are precisely made to build the right neuronal architecture, how they are maintained and how they are modified to code a particular behavior or memory. To understand how neurons find and connect to each other in the right way, his group uses the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans as a model system. His laboratory has developed genetic screens to identify pathways through which synapses are formed, as well as techniques to re-route how pathways are formed by manipulating single cells to track how those changes influence behavior.