He was born in Guasabe, Sinaloa, Mexico. He did his college at “Eng. Pascual Ortiz-Rubio” high school and his medical studies in the school of medicine “Dr. Ignacio Chavez” at the San Nicolas Hidalgo University in Morelia, Michoacan, Mexico. He completed his internal medicine program at the National Institute of Medical Sciences and Nutrition (INCMNSZ, for its acronym in Spanish); at the end of the program he was appointed as Resident-in-chief for one year for his excellent achievements. At the same institution Paul completed his training in gastroenterology with great success. While at the institution, he started working in the Hepatology field before his training in internal medicine under Prof. Guadalupe Garcia-Tsao’s supervision. In fact he completed a one-year of clinical research about two interesting complications of liver cirrhosis such as ascitis and bacterial peritonitis. Paul finished his training in Hepatology at the Mayo Clinic with Prof. Keith Lindor. At this place he started working the two lines of research, chronic cholestasis diseases and Non alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Finally, in the last years Paul was working at the Division of Digestive Diseases & Nutrition, University of Kentucky Medical Center.
One of the big success was his contribution to understand the pathophysiology of NAFLD in an excellent review published in the New England Journal of Medicine.1 In the same line of research another important contribution was the development of the NAFLD fibrosis score a noninvasive system that identifies liver fibrosis in patients with NAFLD.2,3
In cholestasis liver diseases he had several contributions one of them was on bone disease in patients with primary sclerosing colangitis.4,5
Paul was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), American College of Physician (ACP), American Association for the Study of Liver Disease (AASLD), American Gastroenterological Association (AGA), American College of Gastroenterology (ACG), European Association for the Study of the Liver (EASL), and Mexican Associations of Gastroenterology and Hepatology.
Paul has participated in major international meetings such as the liver meeting, International Liver meeting, Digestive Disease Week, The annual Meeting of the American College, the World Gastroenterology Association Meeting and others.
Many will know him or of him through his work as a member of several editorial boards of the most important journals in the field of gastroenterology and hepatology. At this point I would like to point out the Paul’s contribution to Annals of Hepatology (AH). He was one of the first associated editors of our journal. Also he published one of the first concise reviews in AH on the treatment of NAFLD.6
He will be sorely missed by his many peers, friends, and collaborators in the scientific community as a one of the greatest hepatologists, always thorough, brilliant and resourceful.
