"I was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to Florida when I was three, where I lived my whole life until coming to Minnesota for graduate school.

My sister was born with sickle cell anemia and spent a lot of time in the hospital, and that experience inspired me to become a hospital administrator. I was absolutely certain about that decision, and even interned at a hospital in high school.

Administration seemed like the perfect fit until I found public health, though I feel almost like public health found me instead of the other way around. In college I took a public health concepts class and it changed everything for me. Public health has such an enormous potential for impact—actually keeping people out of the hospital.

I’m very interested in evaluation. In so many areas, there’s a lot of research that’s already been done that we’re not really using. I want to be the person who does something with that existing research. I’m a generalist, and not so much focused on any one specific topic, though I’m interested in working with Hispanic and Latinx populations, and I’m definitely interested in global health. What’s nice about evaluation is that it has such broad applications.”