I think it is important to be authentically ourselves in science, especially as underrepresented scholars because we are often in environments that subtly and and sometimes not so subtly can communicate that we do not belong in academia or ought to turn down the volume on part of ourselves. I am primarily writing this bio for those of you who may be considering joining our team or partnering with us because in “the work” so that you can get to know me and decide for yourself whether you resonate with any aspects of this. If so, please do not hesitate to reach out to inquire about ways that we can join forces!

Our team is always looking for new folks to join our team, especially those who: 

• are driven by “calling” to do health equity work
• have a passion for community-engaged research and are willing to put in the time that it takes to build genuine trust with our partners
• love to nerd out on science
• have a desire to be active in the scientific as well as the local community 
• aim high and play the long game
• enjoy close-knit lab environments

Long before being a college student, I knew that I someday wanted to work in the healthcare field. For a long time, I thought my calling was to go to medical school and prepared in high school by volunteering in my local hospital in Greeley, CO and became a Certified Nurse’s Assistant. Prior to going to college at CU-Boulder (Sko Buffs!), I had been given the advice to choose a major that I liked and to complete the pre-med curriculum rather than going a traditional path of becoming a biology major. Fascinated by how the mind and people work, I selected psychology as my major. As time went on, I fell more and more in love with psychology and continued pursuing experiences that were interesting to me, including conducting research and being an intern at the Children’s Hospital in Denver. But I also had a similar passion for public health and global health almost equal to my passion for psychology. I was involved with several student groups where I was engaged in local work and abroad (in Latin America and Asia). When it came time to think about my post-college plans, one thing was clear – I wanted to continue pursuing my education because frankly, I am a nerd who loves learning. I had a difficult choice to make and was between pursuing a Master’s in Public Health or a PhD in Clinical Psychology. Given my desire to be trained to provide clinical services, I opted to become a clinical psychologist. A few months after graduating from college, I drove across the country to wintry Wisconsin to start the next chapter as a grad student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. 

People often want to know why I became a psychologist, often with anticipation of a really powerful turning point in my life or a deeply personal connection to the topic. The truth is, my passion for the field slowly grew over a long period of time. The more I learned through my coursework, my own reading, and my professional and research experiences, the more I wanted to keep learning. I guess early on I was lucky to find my passion and one step always led to the next.   

Now this one does have more of a personal connection. You see, I was the first one in my family to be born in the US because my parents were lucky enough to secure student Visas in the 1980s to study at the University of Kansas-Lawrence. As graduate students at KU, they had me but a few years later, we moved to my parent’s home country of Venezuela to be closer to family. Once in Caracas things were tough. In the early 1990s, Venezuela was undergoing a great deal of political unrest tied to government corruption, which led to economic instability, rising poverty rates, and a widening wealth gap inequality. There were significant protests and strikes that made it difficult to raise a family. Toward the later part of the 1990s, my parents made the difficult decision to return to the US to give my younger sister and me a chance at a better future. We were extremely lucky in that my parents were each able to secure work Visas around the same time, however in totally different parts of the country – my mother in small-town Monmouth, Illinois and my father in bustling Atlanta, Georgia. In order to be able to migrate back to the US, we had to live apart for a while. After some time, we were lucky enough to reunite. That set off a string of moves across the country through the rest of my childhood: Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Texas, and Wyoming before settling in Colorado (where my family still resides to this day).

The most vivid memories I have growing up where of constantly packing our things and moving to the next place. Not only this, but every new place we arrived we made connections with other immigrants who similarly had been uprooted. Growing up, I deeply understood the plight of immigrants, which is partly why I am fascinated by the concept of acculturative stress. But more than that, these experiences also put me up close and personal with the realities of health and healthcare inequities. It became evident to me that health was not something that we all have access to. That it is often determined by one’s identities, neighborhood, documentation status, socioeconomic level, language abilities, and insurance. Despite how difficult the early years were for my family, we have been incredibly lucky and relatively privileged – a reality that I never take for granted. So this is why I decided to become a health equity scholar – I knew that I was one of the lucky ones having, by no action of my own, had the privilege of being born on US soil and being afforded all of the protections that come with that. And despite having experienced moments in my life when my family struggled financially, we always had more than enough and I was lucky enough for circumstances to line up in my favor so that I could pursue my passions. That is a true gift. Because of that, I have always felt that it was my responsibility to do work that would give back to communities similar to the ones where I grew up marked by hassles that make it hard to live healthily whether that be because of having to endure insurmountable stress or because of limited access to quality healthcare.