I'm a graduate student from the Immunology Program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I obtained my undergraduate degree at the Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico in 2005, with a major in Chemistry and a minor in Biology. Afterwards I spent a year working and studying at the Ponce School of Medicine, Department of Biochemistry, in Puerto Rico.
I got interested in research during my senior year in high school, when I had the opportunity to work as a volunteer in Dr. Gregory Quirk's lab at the Ponce School of Medicine, studying the effect of cocaine sensitization on fear responses in rats. Afterwards, I knew science and research were my calling and started working in an HIV-1 research lab studying host cytokine responses to the HIV-1 Tat protein, also at the Ponce School of Medicine, in the lab of Dr. Richard Noel. During my college career I became part of the MARC U*STAR program, funded by NIH, and participated in research internships in the United States.