Jerjes Aguirre-Chavez is a Data Science PhD student at the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute, University of California, San Diego, co-advised by Professor Albert Hsiao (AiDA Lab) and Professor Bradley Voytek (Voytek Lab). His research focuses on vision-language models (VLMs) for radiology and neuroscience, with particular interest in clinical alignment and workflow enhancement — building models that hold up to the demands of real clinical and scientific use, not just benchmark performance. Prior to his PhD, Jerjes worked as a Data Scientist II at ClimateAi, focusing on climate risk management, hurricane forecasting, and flood forecasting, and as a Research Trainee at the Fetal-Neonatal Neuroimaging and Developmental Science Center (Boston Children’s Hospital / Harvard Medical School), applying deep learning to fetal brain age prediction.