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.