Bio
I was born in the Bronx, NYC, nearby Yankee stadium. As a kid education was not a priority more of a distraction. Fortunately, my grandmother pushed me to go to college and to go away to college. As the first family member to leave NYC as well as to attend college it was really eye opening. At Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, I majored in Chemistry, with minors in Biology, Sociology and Biomedical Engineering. It was here through a work study job that I was introduced to research and found that there were real life applications to the textbook learning. I was fortunately to work in the lab of a PI who saw potential in me and helped direct me toward graduate school. I was also fortunate to work in an upward bound program where I realized I enjoyed teaching and working toward giving others opportunities academically. I was the first graduate of a new neuroscience PhD program at Tulane University. It was here, aside from falling in love with New Orleans, that I found my niche working in sensory neuroscience at the cell and molecular level. Following graduate school, I bounced to the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston where I dabbled with imaging technology and moving. Having largely failed in my major research project, I moved to Madison WI, intent on developing new technologies that would allow me to answer the questions for which I was most interested. It was here where I was successful and leveraged technical knowledge and newly developed tools to work on mechanotransduction in auditory sensory hair cells. I launched an independent research career, with a first faculty position back in New Orleans at LSU Medical Center. Hurricane Katrina washed us out to the West coast, where I became part of a new Otolaryngology department with a mission built around optimizing healthcare, building a strong research footprint and educating the next generation of surgeons and scientists. Since joining Stanford, my research interest have expanded to include translational work as well as investigating at the systems level, the role of hearing loss on cognitive function.
I have also had the opportunity to engage in teaching and in building programs that expand the population of students who have the chance to reach their scientific potential. These programs enrich our community and help to shape what academia will be in the future. I served as the director of the Neuroscience Graduate Program for about eight years. I was a co-founder of the ADVANCE Summer Institute, an onboarding program for incoming bioscience graduate students from underserved backgrounds. I was the faculty lead for this program for more than 10 years. I was part of the group that created the Bioscience Diversity Advisory Committee, that contributes to ensuring best practices in admissions and recruitment were available to all graduate programs. I was part of the team that built Propel, a postdoctoral fellows program that works to help transition postdocs to faculty positions. Most recently, I helped to create a new postbaccalaureate program as part of the REACH initiative. This program provides a strong research-based opportunity to scholars from underrepresented backgrounds interested in a research or medical career.
