I was born and raised in the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico. After I finished high school, I attended the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign for my undergraduate education and received a B.S. in Microbiology in 1990. I then ventured to the University of California Santa Cruz, where I received my M.A. in Biology in 1992. After UCSC, I worked as a cellular immunologist for the Gene Therapy Division of Baxter Biotech in Irvine, CA. In 1994, I was accepted at Stanford University, where I received a Ph.D. in Immunology in 2002. Following my dreams, I moved to France with the help of a Pasteur Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, where I did my postdoctoral training in the Department of Immunology at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. Currently, I'm an Assistant Professor at the newly formed University of California campus in Merced. I'm now teaching Microbiology, Biology of Superheroes, and doing research in blood stem cells.