Yonny is a 4th year biology student at the California State University, Fullerton. His research experience is in biology and computational analysis with Drs. Cally Xiao, Archana McEligot and Arthur Toga on the Global Associated Alzheimer’s Network (GAAIN). His most valuable experience in the NAARE program is being able to create a network with fellow peers, PhD students, faculty, and researchers. Throughout the program, Yonny feels that the team was very communicative, which made the experience phenomenal. “Every question or concern that I had was always addressed so I never had to worry” Yonny adds. Yonny states how he appreciates the opportunity to present his research project to a wide variety of people, allowing him to grow more comfortable with presenting.
Yonny shares that he came from a very poor background with no financial support for school. He started working at around the age of 16 and has not stopped since. He first attended Santa Ana College right out of high school and transferred to California State University, Los Angeles. However, due to the demands of supporting himself and his family financially, he had to leave school after his 3rd quarter term. He became a lab technician and a maintenance coordinator in the span of 4 years, which is where he gained many life lessons about the workforce. Eventually, he started to come back to school to study biology and start all over again in the hopes of becoming a medical doctor.
At the age of 26 and with 5 years out of school, Yonny remembers feeling nervous about coming back to start in a new field. He attended Orange Coast College for 8 semesters, and he developed into a stronger academic scholar. By the time he got to California State University, Fullerton, he had learned how to study and network properly. He knew that he wanted to get into research for his career, so he applied to the Research Career Preparatory program, where he joined the lab of Dr. Nikolas Nikolaidis. Through his time with Dr. Nikolaidis, Yonny learned about data science and the beauty of visualizing data. This motivated him to take a data science class, where he further enhanced his abilities to program in R language to assist with his research. In the class, he was able to hear about the NAARE Scholars program. “It was something that I instantly knew that I wanted to do," Yonny comments. "The rest is history.”
