Antonio David Paez Espino
Adjunct Associate Professor of Personalized Medicine
Research Interests
Professor Páez-Espino’s teaching and research interests span microbiome, virome, metagenomics, viruses, phage-host relations, and CRISPR-based technologies. He earned his PhD in Synthetic and Biological Sciences at the Centro Nacional de Biotecnología (CNB-CSIC) in Spain, where he studied microbial responses to environmental arsenic and developed tools to investigate gram-negative bacterial arsenic resistance using synthetic biological circuits. Professor Páez-Espino has authored more than 50 scientific publications, including influential papers in Nature, Science, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Communications, Nucleic Acids Research, and other journals, as well as dozens of CRISPR application patents, and his work on Earth’s microbiomes and viral databases has accrued thousands of citations in the scientific literature. Email
In addition to his position at MBZUAI, Professor Páez-Espino is the Chief Technology Officer of Ancilia Biosciences, a company developing bacterial therapeutics that target viral components of the human microbiome, which he co-founded alongside Alexandra Sakatos and Rodolphe Barrangou in 2019. Prior to that, he was the Associate Director of Discovery Informatics and Metagenomics Lead, applying large-scale data science and CRISPR knowledge to discovery programs with Mammoth Biosciences.
After his doctorate, Professor Páez-Espino completed postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley and the DOE Joint Genome Institute, working on microbial genomics and metagenomics, and on the discovery of novel viral genomes and their host organisms, including collaborations on CRISPR with Jennifer Doudna and on the global virome with Nikolaos Kyrpides.
- Postdoctoral Fellow at Joint Genome Institute, USA
- Postdoctoral Fellow at University of California, Berkeley, USA
- Ph.D. in Molecular Biology, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
- M.Sc. in Environmental Analysis and Management, International Research Centre in Environmental Sciences (EULA), University of Concepción, Chile
- B.Sc. in Environmental Sciences, University of Córdoba, Spain
- Xiaoyue Guo, Yantao Liang, Chen Gao, Hao Yu, Meiwen Wang, Hongbing Shao, Yeqing Yang, David Paez‐Espino, Andrew McMinn, Min Wang: "Diversity and Ecological Potentials of Marine Viruses Inhabiting Continental Shelf Seas", Advanced Science, 2026.
- Kaiyang Zheng, Yantao Liang, Yan Zhang, David Páez-Espino, Hongbing Shao, Yeong Yik Sung, Wen Jye Mok, Li Lian Wong, Shi Wang, Andrew McMinn, Min Wang: "Diversity of reverse-transcriptase-containing viruses through global metagenomics", hLife, 2025.
- Kaiyang Zheng, Jianhua Sun, Yantao Liang, Liangliang Kong, David Paez-Espino, Andrew Mcminn, Min Wang: "VITAP: a high precision tool for DNA and RNA viral classification based on meta-omic data", Nature Communications, 2025.
- Emily B Graham, Antonio Pedro Camargo, Ruonan Wu, Russell Y Neches, Matt Nolan, David Paez-Espino, Nikos C Kyrpides, Janet K Jansson, Jason E McDermott, Kirsten S Hofmockel: "A global atlas of soil viruses reveals unexplored biodiversity and potential biogeochemical impacts", Nature Microbiology, 2024.
- Lucas B Harrington, David Burstein, Janice S Chen, David Paez-Espino, Enbo Ma, Isaac P Witte, Joshua C Cofsky, Nikos C Kyrpides, Jillian F Banfield, Jennifer A Doudna: "Programmed DNA destruction by miniature CRISPR-Cas14 enzymes", American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2018.