Ciencia Puerto Rico

My name is Adrian Rivera Alsina, I was born and raised at Cayey, Puerto Rico. I got a high school diploma in the Colegia Nuestra Señora de la Merced, where I learned and discovered that my passion is science. Now I am an undergraduate student at the University of Puerto Rico at Cayey that want to pursue a career in science. Specifically I found interesting themes like neuroscience and chemistry due to various academic and personal experiences.

In my first year at university, I discovered, thanks to my General Biology classes, that cells are extremely interesting. They are so small but so big at the same time that it seemed incredible to me to be able to study them. When I took the neuroscience course, I saw something that changed me completely due to the amount of information I wanted to know about it, and that was neurons and their ability to create synapses. It still draws my attention today because it is incredible how they can communicate and how they lead to behavior just by continuing the communication chain.

Right now I work as an undergraduate researcher at the University of Puerto Rico at Cayey in a research project aimed at behavior of Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies and their microbiota. In this project I have developed many skills such as the capacity of make an analysis of experimental data and do gut dissections from the Drosophila melanogasters. In this investigation I can learn about neuroscience while I see the behavior of the fruit flies and that is the reason why I like to work at that laboratory, I can improve my academic knowledge and enjoy it at the same time.