I was born and raised in Santiago, Panama and I majored in Chemistry at the University of Panama, becoming the first college graduate in my family. I received an international scholarship from the Brazilian Government and the Organization of American States to enroll in a Master’s program in Environmental Chemistry at the Federal University of Rio Grande in Brazil. I earned a Fulbright foreign scholarship from the US Department of State to study a PhD in Environmental Engineering at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. During my PhD research, I collaborated on multidisciplinary projects funded by the National Science Foundation and mentored several graduate and undergraduate students from underrepresented backgrounds in science. I excelled in my presentation skills, publication record, and won several awards along the way, including the local 3MT competition, a Tandon Faculty First Look Fellowship from New York University, and the Graduate Student Award in Environmental Chemistry from the American Chemical Society. I did a one-year postdoctoral training at the University of Minnesota where I led a project funded by the State of Minnesota’s Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund and currently, I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama working in the hydrology section of the Agua Salud project.
