ABOVE: © Ken Richardson Photography
As he tells it, there’s been no grand design to Otto Cordero’s career path. Instead, the MIT associate professor says, there’s been “a lot of serendipity.”
Cordero knew from an early age that he wanted a career in science. But in Ecuador, where he grew up, there were few opportunities for young researchers, he says. So, after graduating with a degree in computer engineering from Guayaquil’s Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral in 2003, he accepted a graduate scholarship at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. “It changed my life,” he says.
Cordero worked with Utrecht’s Paulien Hogeweg—a theoretical biologist who coined the term “bioinformatics” in 1970—and learned about using computational approaches to model living systems. “That, I found fascinating,” Cordero says. “Immediately, I was in love with the thing. That’s really what got me started in biology.”
The pair published multiple papers on gene transfer in ...
