In October of 2023 I’ll be starting my third year as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and the Department of Cancer Biology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. My research is supported by a career development award from the National Institute on Aging through the NINDS BRAIN Initiative (DSPAN F99/K00). In August of 2021 I completed my PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University under the mentorship of Drs. Miriam Goodman and Beth Pruitt.

As a non-traditional, Chicana student with a disadvantaged background, I took a very unusual route to academia that involved many years trying to make it on my own, struggling to support myself while attending community college, and then making the leap from a non-PhD granting state school, to one of the top three engineering programs in the world. Over the years I’ve shared bits of that journey in various forms that can be accessed via the links below: