Iñigo Apaolaza, PhD student of Francis Planes and assistant to the the Deputy Director of Alumni of the School, is currently on a stay in the USA. Specifically, he is working at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and at the Massachusetts General Hospital, in the laboratory of Dr. Ramnik Xavier. 

His research is focused on chronic inflammatory diseases of the digestive system such as Ulcerative Colitis or Crohn's Disease. "One of the objectives of my work is to determine the role played by the bacteria of the intestinal flora in the development of this subject of diseases and the main challenge is that we study very complex systems, with a huge number of variables that are very complex to study as a whole," explains Apaolaza.

Iñigo Apaolaza's stay in Boston has been very eventful, "Everything has happened to me," he confesses. Starting with the landing of the plane in which he flew there. "It was quite forced", so much so that the first week he had to make a brief visit to the hospital. But most curious of all is the story of how he ended up in Boston. "In September last year, my group at Tecnun and I published a article in the journal Nature Communications that interested a employee at the Broad Institute and he tried, on his own, to replicate the results we obtained. One night I received an email from this researcher saying that he thought we had got one thing wrong and that therefore part of the published results were wrong. I was very scared, but when I asked him for the code he had programmed, Francis Planes and I realized that it was him who had made a mistake. He even sent us some mugs from Boston University to apologize for his mistake. This led to talk about the possibility of me going with them for a few months, and they thought it was a good idea," he says.

Iñigo has been in the USA for almost three months, and his time in the country is coming to an end. Although he will be back at Tecnun on 3 December, the idea is to continue collaborating with the Boston group from a distance "and both they and we are willing for him to return in the future".

The Broad Institute is a research center with 2000 employees and the Massachusetts General Hospital is a hospital with more than 25000. In the group where Iñigo works there are about 60 people, most of them doctors who are dedicated exclusively to research. "Having such a large hospital nearby, the capacity to generate data is also brutal," highlights the PhD student of Tecnun. "This makes it easier to conduct certain types of analyses." For example, the analysis he is doing had never been done before because no one had the data that Iñigo now has. "In that I feel very fortunate." In any case, if I had to compare this center with Tecnun I would say that, technically, we are on a par. "There are things they know and we don't, but there are also things we know and they don't."

For all these reasons, Iñigo considers it to be a very enriching experience. "I'm working in a team with people from many different countries, from different cultures, etc. And professionally, I am learning to handle different types of data that we had not yet worked on at Tecnun and that we are going to have to analyse from now on in San Sebastian", concludes Apaolaza.