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Un Consejo - Dr. Nandadevi Cortes-Rodriguez

4/18/2024

Dr. Nandadevi Cortes-Rodriguez is an Assistant professor and a biologist.
[My first] consejo is sometimes, we will have to work twice as hard as some other ethnicities and break many stereotypes, but in the end, working [at] what we love is extremely rewarding.
Being a Latina in STEM is very rewarding, and I remember something a high school Latina student from California told me while I was at the Smithsonian: “I am very happy to see that someone from Mexico is working in this prestigious institution, it gives me hope that one day I could work in a prestigious place like you.”
[My second] consejo is thinking outside your box. I am a biologist, so I have always done things to think and go to the field. However, I was given the opportunity to work in another area during my PhD. And it was great. It was a big success. I learned how to do different things, like logistics, how to contact new students, [and] how to interact with other people. So it helped me [to get] out of my box.
Seek new opportunities. Maybe it is a little bit different from what you learn [or] what you do. In the end, those different things will help you grow and will help you get a very successful career in any of the STEM fields you are currently seeking or doing.

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April 01st, 2024

4/1/2024

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Dr. Sandra Sanchez, Post-doc at Tufts University and future faculty at Framingham State University.

I am a Microbiologist. I earned my PhD in Biology from Indiana University Bloomington. I am currently a postdoc at Tufts University in Boston MA. I am extremely happy that I will be starting a faculty position as an Assistant Professor of Biology at Framingham State University. I will be teaching undergraduates and running a small laboratory where undergraduates can get experience in research.

I work on an organism called Vibrio cholerae which is the bacterium that causes the disease Cholera. This disease is not in many countries that have the technology and money to clean their water. [It] is found in many developing countries but also countries that have natural disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes that might destroy their water filtration sites. I have been studying the connection between motility (how the organism uses its flagellum to move around the environment) and quorum sensing communication (the organism secretes little molecules into the environment so it can communicate with other of its own species). Hopefully if we learn more about how the organism communicates and moves around, we can find ways to stop it from causing disease.

I didn’t grow up knowing that a scientist was an option, but when I was introduced to that world in community college, I remember being in awe of microorganisms. They are these unseen things that are super simple cells and can do so much. They can cause horrible diseases and also are so important for plants and our planet. I just wanted to learn more about them and how they were capable of doing so much when they seemed so small.

I don’t know if I had a role model growing up. Being an immigrant child, [my life] was a little hectic to have a role model while growing up. Once I was in my 20s, my parents became my role models. They moved countries, which sounds scary if you are doing it alone let alone with three children. They worked so hard when they got to the United States, had multiple jobs while they learned English, and [they] got settled. My father was the first in our family to attend community college; he wanted to show us that education was important, so he went to community college to take English classes and earn an associate degree in business.

I didn’t know what graduate school was or that research was an option as a career when I was an undergraduate. I was extremely fortunate to have met two fantastic women when I started attending community college. One was my anatomy professor, and the other one was my [general biology] professor. They told me about their career path and how they both had gone on to graduate school, and that is why they have the title of doctor. They were the ones who guided me to apply for programs that exposed me to research.

I would suggest you get to know your professors and classmates; have conversations about what they are doing. You might find fields that you weren’t aware of, or opportunities [about which you didn’t know]. If you think you might be interested in a field, try to participate in a program; sometimes it will surprise you. When I first went back to community college, I thought I wanted to be a nurse or a doctor (MD), I applied to an internship program at the LA County Hospital and after a couple of months I realized that this was not my passion, but then I applied to a research program over the winter session and I worked in a microbiology lab and I knew I had found my path.

I didn’t know this was going to be my path. My parents immigrated to the US when I was 11 years old, and I didn’t know anything about college or being a scientist. I graduated from high school and started to work because I needed money to take care of myself and help my family a little if I could. I was successful, I started as a receptionist and moved up to a sales rep at a software company. I had to travel for my work, and one day I was sitting on a plane and realized that I didn’t like to travel and didn’t really have a passion for my job. I wanted more. So, I started attending evening classes at my local community college. I met other students who were going for nursing, and I thought “why not.” At this college, I met the women that would change my life. I talked about this earlier, but I was taking all my classes for nursing. I took a Microbiology course and that’s when I realized I liked bacteria and science. With help from my professors, I decided to change my major.

[My career path] is not what is considered traditional because I didn’t go to school right after high school. I worked for a long time, and then attended a community college before figuring out what I wanted to do for my career.

When I am teaching, I love the moment that a student gets excited about biology/science. For example, when a student can see under a microscope what a bacterium looks like; or when we are discussing something in class and a student comes up after and says, “my cousin has diabetes and now I understand why and how it happens”.

In the lab, [there are] times you are the first person ever to try something. So, when that works out, and you know something no one else knows, it’s exciting. Mostly these are small steps, but it can help answer questions that can help us understand big concepts.

I have people ask me medical questions because they know I am a Dr., but they think PhD is the same as a medical doctor. I also have people think that scientists are like what they see in movies, so they think I’m surrounded by expensive and weird machines.

Science doesn’t always work the way you want, which can be great but can be frustrating. As a scientist, you get to be the first to learn something new but that comes with trials and errors as you are figuring out an experiment.

There are a lot of options: you can work for the government, or you can work for a company that makes vaccines or medicine. You can become a professor, which is what I want to do. You can also be a writer or a science journalist. There are many options.

[The salary range for this field of work is] very varied. If you are a professor at a small liberal arts college or State University, it can start at $60,000 up to $100,000. If you are a professor at a [prominent] research university, such as Yale or Harvard, that mostly starts with salaries over $110,000. If you instead go into industry and work for a company performing research, then you start [at a salary] of $120,000 and can earn up to $160,000.

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Un Consejo - Dr. Nandadevi Cortes-Rodriguez

April 01st, 2024

Latinas in STEM Blog

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