Member Spotlight: Andrés Gutiérrez, PhD
Name:
Andrés Gutiérrez Title:
Postdoc Scholar, Vila Ellis laboratory
Year joined Northwestern:
2024
Can you say a few words about yourself and your work at Northwestern?
I am a Biochemist (UNAV ’13) with a PhD in Biology (UAM ’24). I love microscopy in general, and I am a specialist in confocal microscopy and live imaging. I have been working with confocal microscopes since 2014.
At NU I am working at the Vila Ellis Lab, I have several projects but the most important one is implementing live imaging methods to study the capillary lung development in real time in newborn mice.
Describe the impact your work or research project has on the broader community at Northwestern.
This work will benefit not only those who work on capillary development but everyone who works in lung biology in general. We are developing protocols that, hopefully, will allow scientist to visualize processes in real time. They will not depend anymore in fixed timepoints to study dynamic processes.
Describe something you wish you knew when you moved to Chicago.
Coming from Europe, we tend to think that US is more similar to our countries than it really is. Yes, we share some common culture, but there is so much more to discover (and keep in mind). Also, Chicago is surprisingly nice for pedestrians! We can go walking almost everywhere in the city!
What is your favorite summer activity?
My wife and I love going to the lakeshore and enjoy the breeze, it’s a big plus when work gets too stressful! If it is too hot, nothing like an iced drink on the Navy Pier… and the fireworks!!! And the Airshow! The city is full of life during summer. It’s understandable, winter here is next level survival…
If you could collaborate with (or meet) any scientist, living or deceased, who would it be and why?
Oh, this is a difficult one… we are standing on the shoulders of giants. I would have loved to be on the Solvay conference in 1927, every single one of those people left a deep mark in science. I guess the one I would like to have a good chat with would be Isaac Newton, his intelligence and brightness was almost unreachable.