I grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in a family of non-scientists. I pursued an undergraduate degree in biology at the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras, where I engaged in research onto the structure and function of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors. Last year I completed a Ph.D. degree with Dr. Li-Huei Tsai at MIT. My dissertation work centered on examining the independent contributions of the Cdk5 activators p35 and the proteolytically generated p25, both in the context of neurodegeneration and synaptic plasticity. After completing my PhD, I was a Christine Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy fellow at the National Academy of Sciences where I had the opportunity to learn about the intersection between science, politics, and policy. This wonderful opportunity allowed me to explore my broad interests in science policy and to gain a greater understanding of the US scientific enterprise and issues of higher education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. My postdoctoral research with Dr. Patrick Sullivan at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was focused on the pharmacogenetics of adverse drug reactions caused by antipsychotics. One project used RNA-seq to examine the transcriptional changes in mouse striatum upon chronic haloperidol exposure (Kim, YJ*, Giusti-Rodríguez*, et al, Mol Psych, 2016). Another project, involved behavioral phenotyping of 800+ mice from the genetically diverse Collaborative Cross (CC) mouse population (Giusti-Rodríguez et al, G3, 2020). These projects relied on team science and project management approaches, in which I mentored undergraduate students and laboratory technicians, and collaborated with multiple PIs and biostatisticians. In 2016 I was awarded a K01 Mentored Research Scientist Development Award which allowed me to implement genomics assays, such as chromatin conformation capture, for the in the aid of linking genetics to biological mechanisms.