Personal information
Biography
R. Ariel Gomez received his medical degree at the University of Buenos Aires School of Medicine in Argentina in 1975. He completed his residency in Pediatrics at Hospital de Ninos “Ricardo Gutierrez”, Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1978 and then fellowships in Pediatric Nephrology at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa (1983) where he pursued research studies under the mentorship of Jean Robillard, MD, and at the University of California, San Francisco (1984) .
Dr. Gomez joined the Pediatrics Department at The University of Virginia School of Medicine in 1984 as an Assistant Professor and established an independent research program that has been continuously supported by NIH funding since 1988. From 1997-2000 Dr. Gomez served as Genentech Professor and Associate Chair for Research for the Department of Pediatrics. In 2001 he became Interim Vice President for Research and Public Service and then, in 2003, Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies. He returned to full time research in 2008 as the Harrison Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics and Biology.
Dr. Gomez served as program director for a previous Center of Excellence in Pediatric Nephrology and Urology for 10 years and for the Child Health Research Center for 10 years, both at the University of Virginia
Research in Dr.Gomez’s lab focuses on renin-synthesizing cells and kidney vascular development. Renin cells are crucial in the regulation of blood pressure and fluid and electrolyte homeostasis in the adult. In addition to their adult role, lineage tracing studies using a mouse we generated that expresses cre recombinase under the control of the renin locus, revealed that renin cells are also precursors for multiple cell types, including renal vascular smooth muscle, mesangial and tubular epithelial cells as wells as extrarenal cells such as Leydig and adrenal cells. Current studies aim at defining the determinants of renin cell identity and the mechanisms that govern the development of the kidney vasculature.
To define the factors governing renin cell identity we are testing the hypothesis that renin cell identity is determined by the three-dimensional conformation of chromatin resulting from the interaction of renin gene regulatory sequences (enhancer and promoter) with other genes in the genome. We are using epigenetic approaches to build a map of chromatin modifications for the renin cell to define the active and inactive regions of chromatin responsible for the renin cell phenotype and chromosome conformation capture to identify key transcriptional factories/gene-gene interactions characteristic of the renin cell.