I grew up in California in a family of farm workers who are originally from Mexico, where people take a lot of pride in agricultural work. My mother is a social worker, and when I was young, I would help her at health fairs for migrant workers, giving out free books to kids. I saw up-close some of the disparities in healthcare in that community. We would screen people for high blood pressure or diabetes, but many of them didn’t have health insurance for treatment. I knew early on I wanted to do something to help others, and that experience is what attracted me to work in the healthcare field.
My father had to stop going to school to work when he was six years old, so my mother pushed me to get a good education. In college, I struggled with pre-med classes, because being first-generation is hard – you don’t have an example to lead you. I ended up majoring in Chicano studies. After college, I was still interested in healthcare, so I went to a post-baccalaureate pre-med program in San Francisco, where I found a job in clinical research. I’d never heard of biotech or other options in medicine besides being a doctor or nurse, so a new world opened up to me.
