Spotlight: Jay

Jayson Gutierrez interviewed by JJ Ramberg

The first thing you need to know about Jay is that barely a day goes by without Jay ending a discord post with a rocketship emoji and an “LFG!” Jay is excited. He is optimistic. He is in it to win it. Spend three minutes with Jay and you come away thinking anything and everything is possible. Jay is a computational biologist specializing in oceanic food webs and metabolic plankton networks. He is our bioinformatics lead here at NA who is building the metagenome pipeline and experiment design for our MPA data collection.

I think the best way to start to understand what you do and care about is to unpack your bio on Twitter which is: “Leveraging data science & computational biocomplexity to engineer multidimensional biodiversity & ecological data assets.” Explain that to me.

To understand nature, and even more critically to value it in economic terms, we need to collect data, lot’s of data! Data is simply a digital representation of a particular aspect of a system/phenomenon we desire to study or valorize. The problem is that most real-world systems, including natural ecosystems, social networks and the global economy, are inherently complex, meaning they involve a huge number of actors/players/components that tend to interact in many different (often non-linear) ways. Such heterogeneity of interactions in a complex system gives rise to emergent behaviors, which individual actors/players/components are unable to exhibit in isolation. Therefore, in order to understand/decode the relationship between the quantifiable (both observable and hidden in plain sight) biodiversity of natural ecosystems and their functioning and services they provide, we need to go to the field or rely on remote sensing systems to obtain high quality data, which we can adequately interpret using computer (statistical/mathematical) models. This is critical to make informed decisions at the level of ecosystem management and conservation planning strategies, as well as for economic valuation purposes.

What brought you to this work?

My passion for science and the ocean. My commitment for perpetual learning, my drive and persistence. Never give up!

What is the most exciting thing you’ve done or seen in your career so far?

Honestly, the ability to use super-computers to simulate real world problems and to analyze big data and extract valuable knowledge in a matter of days-to-weeks is perhaps the most satisfying achievement in my career. Likewise, this has also been quite a humbling experience. Why? Because even with the most sophisticated mathematical models and algorithms at our disposal you often come to conclusion that most biological phenomena are so convoluted that attempting a full computational representation is either unpractical to gain some valuable understanding about underlying processes, or not possible due to computational limitations.

Why is biodiversity important?

Biodiversity is the building block of any conceivable natural ecosystem, which is functional, healthy, productive, adaptable, resilient and robust to perturbations such as ocean warming and acidification. Indeed, a growing body of direct and indirect evidence indicate that biodiversity (e.g. species richness) tends to confer on ecosystems functional redundancy and complementarity. It is important to remind people here that the species composition of natural ecosystems and the many intricate interrelationships among species, are features that have been shaped over long periods of time via non-trivial evolutionary processes driven by natural selection and random events. Accelerated biodiversity loss driven by anthropogenic disturbances thus implies pushing natural ecosystems towards less productive regimes and increasingly more vulnerable states. This has a great variety of yet unappreciated repercussions for the global economy and for our very own existence.

Why is Plankton so important?

Marine plankton is a complex system of interacting (mostly) microscopic organisms with an incredibly diverse evolutionary history which have modified fundamentally the gas composition of the earth’s atmosphere over billions of years. This species interaction network forms the basis of the entire marine food web which sustains oceanic biogeochemical cycles and help regulate climate. Just think for a moment about this fact: approximately 50% of the oxygen molecules you take in are being produced in the ocean by the phytoplankton, the group of organisms in the planktonic network that converts solar energy and inorganic carbon into organic components so crucial to marine life. With the advent of high-throughput sequencing technologies for environmental DNA research, we have been able to estimate the biodiversity of the planktonic ecosystem in terms of taxonomic and molecular diversity, at different depths and oceanic provinces, and we were able to elucidate seasonal patterns of variation.

What is your favorite thing about the ocean?

Right now, to me the most intriguing thing about the ocean is the sheer complexity (connectivity) of the marine food web, and most in particular the relationship between the multi-trophic diversity and emergent properties of the planktonic ecosystem. However, when I was a kid living on a wonderful island in the Caribbean, I loved to spend countless of hours snorkeling, spearfishing and shore fishing for barracudas, jacks and snappers. So I use to say that I was born into the Sea!

What would be the most exciting problem you could solve?

My long-term goal is to contribute science-based conceptual and technical skills for developing an innovative and robust monitoring-reporting-verification (MRV) framework to engineer high quality marine biodiversity-/ecological-based data assets that encapsulate the intrinsic complexity of nature (i.e. networked and distributed organization). This is a critical step in the roadmap towards the creation of an open, transparent and decentralized digital marketplace so urgently needed for adequately pricing the unique services and goods provided by marine ecosystems.

Pricing natural capital assets is perhaps the best mechanism we have at this point to promote a new global economy centered around protection and regeneration, rather than over-exploitation and degradation, of our green and blue carbon ecosystems.

What brought you to NewAtlantis?

I’ve been a crypto enthusiast already for a couple of years, and I used to follow not only the markets but mostly new business models and technological developments almost on a weekly basis. That enthusiasm led me to dig deep into DeFi protocols and realize the magic of programmable money. Upon reading several chapters of the books “DeFi and the Future of Finance” and “Token Economy: How the Web3 reinvents the Internet”, my interest in Web3 technologies went through the roof. Leveraging my decent skills to search the Web (hahahahaha just kidding here!), I came across the NA’s homepage and decided to follow the DAO via Twitter. It took me just a couple of tweets to connect with my friend and incredibly talented developer-researcher Stanley, after which we had a wonderful call where we discussed at a high level the whole vision and mission of NA and the founders, the amazing serial entrepreneurs Courtney and Gordon. Then, during the next call we had Courtney and Gordon joined and I felt totally aligned with the project. During that call, I felt like I had found my niche in the Web3 space where I could make meaningful and impactful contributions as a developer-researcher. I believe that the combination of mainstream scientific tools applied to study life in the oceans, blockchain technology, decentralized science (DeSci), regenerative finance (ReFi) and crypto-economics, makes the value proposition of NA quite unique in the Web3 space. This is absolutely fascinating but quite challenging as well. It takes a lot of reading and drive to realize the incredible transformative potential of this multidisciplinary approach.

What are you working on with NewAtlantis?

At NA, our aim is to leverage the power of high throughput sequencing technologies to profile the biodiversity of marine protected areas (MPAs). To achieve this, we will apply a great variety of computational methods and mathematical modeling approaches that have been developed in the emerging field of computational microbial ecology, which is growing in popularity as a quantitative framework to understand and predict host-associated and environmental microbiomes.

What most excites you about what NewAtlantis is doing?

It is the multidisciplinary approach to create a sustainable business model for MPAs. In fact, this holistic approach allowed me to appreciate the huge role that Web3 technologies can have in making financial infrastructure and services real public goods, not only for humanity but for nature in general. Now I can clearly see why conventional finance is not optimal mechanism for solving the climate crisis, and more in general the meta-crisis. under this paradigm money is the end game, it doesn’t care about externalities and focuses only on yield and maximization of returns for the shareholders. In stark contrast, in Web3-powered regenerative finance (ReFi), money is a tool and not the end goal. Here, money will be put to work towards ecosystems-level changes, ecological healing, habitat restoration and conservation. Investors in ReFi-oriented projects are expected to make profits through impactful and meaningful contributions that seek to make natural ecosystems more productive, stable, resilient, robust and potentially more adaptable to an increasingly more unstable environment. Moreover, the idea that Web3-powered ReFi promotes circulation rather than asymmetric accumulation of money is quite appealing from an incentive design perspective, which can be efficiently, effectively and securely explored using blockchain technology and crypto-economics together with recent developments in token engineering.

There are two members of this founding group at NewAtlantis who are referred to as Jay and it’s very confusing in our meetings — you and me (JJ). One of us is going to have to budge. Have any nicknames I can socialize for you?

That’s easy, they call me jagut!

Follow Jay on Twitter