Juan C. Sanchez-Arias (he/him) 🇨🇴 🇨🇦
Data Scientist at BenchSci • Neuroscientist • Medical Doctor
Bridging medicine, computational biology, and AI-driven engineering to accelerate preclinical drug discovery and build empowering community tools.
About & Bio
Juan C. Sanchez-Arias, MD, PhD is a Medical Doctor, neuroscientist, and Google-Certified Generative AI Leader working as a Data Scientist at BenchSci. He bridges medicine, computational biology, and AI-driven engineering to accelerate and elevate preclinical drug discovery.
Previously, he was a Health Research BC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Division of Medical Sciences at the University of Victoria, where his research combined advanced microscopy, model organism genetics, and computational tools to study brain and cardiac development. His interests span GenAI evaluation and benchmarking, biomedical data science, bio-image analysis, and open science. In his spare time, Juan develops community-focused tools, including the Victoria Childcare Hub.
Experience
Architecting AI-driven data intelligence pipelines and hardening extraction systems to deliver high-throughput API endpoints to support agentic preclinical biomedical acceleration.
Led multidisciplinary teams and directed technical strategy to improve the observability and scientific quality of data pipelines. Engineered comprehensive analytics frameworks to evaluate disease relations across journal articles (MONDO, ICD-10, SNOMED), ensuring robust data quality metrics and standards. Partnered with cross-functional stakeholders (Product, Engineering) to align scientific requirements with shared technical execution and delivery.
Developed and optimized biomedical data extraction workflows to enhance precision and data quality.
Led the design of a holistic and culturally safe translational research project to investigate an arrhythmia-causing genetic variant identified in the Gitxsan First Nation. Managed complex genomic and transcriptomic datasets using advanced bioinformatics (R, Bioconductor) to discover mechanisms underlying cardiomyocyte and neuronal calcium homeostasis.
Engineered conditional knockout mouse models and optimized primary neuronal cultures to investigate mechanisms of dendritic spine plasticity and cerebral cortex development. Developed advanced microscopy methods to visualize cellular dynamics and established accessible bio-image analysis frameworks for the research community.
Medical Education & Teaching
Instructed first- and second-year medical trainees in neuroanatomy laboratory sessions (MEDD412, MEDD421, MEDD422), fostering a dynamic educational space centered on the functional integration of clinical signs with neural structures and physiological processes.
Clinical Training & Early Research
Completed clinical rotations across Internal Medicine, Paediatrics, Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Specialized Research Internship in Biomedical Science (Neuroscience Research), Surgery, and Family Medicine.
Clinical observership under the supervision of Dr. Konstantin Slavin.
Refined experimental procedures for modeling diffuse traumatic brain injury (organotypic brain tissue preparations) and coordinated regional surveys assessing cardiovascular risk factors in spinal cord injury patients.
Community & Engineering Projects
Education
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) | Neuroscience
University of Victoria
Victoria, BC, Canada
Doctoral research in cellular and molecular neuroscience, dendritic spine plasticity, and cerebral cortex development using advanced biological imaging.
Doctor of Medicine (MD)
Universidad del Valle, School of Medicine
Cali, Colombia
Medical training with clinical rotations across hospital medicine, emergency care, surgical trauma, pediatrics, and biomedical research.