I am originally from Mexico and did my undergrad at UNAM in Mexico City. From the moment I first did a single-channel recording of an ion channel that was hard-at-work, fluxing potassium across the membrane of a neuron, back when I was an undergraduate at UNAM, I was overcome with curiosity and excitement and hooked on neuroscience. I became fascinated by ion channels and by the intricate ways they function within neurons to allow them to respond to inputs, encode information, and perform computations. I pursued my Ph.D. at Brandeis University where I focused on the study of homeostatic plasticity, a type of cell-autonomous plasticity that is thought to underlie the ability of cortical circuits to adapt to global changes in input, and discovered that it can contribute to destabilizing circuits during development and lead to epilepsy if left unchecked. That work led me to become interested in developing the expertise and toolset to investigate how neural plasticity mechanisms at the cellular level shape the computations that neural circuits are capable of at the systems level in ways that may contribute to balanced or imbalanced neural function and thus health or disease. I now pursue these interests in Susan Dymecki’s lab, where I am currently studying a subpopulation of serotonergic neurons with strong interconnectivity to limbic brain regions involved in regulating emotional memory formation.