I was born in 1985 in a town in the Herrera province of Panama called Chitré, where my entire family comes from. I’ve lived my whole life in the capital city, though, and I consider myself very much a city girl. I am very liberal, fairly open-minded, sarcastic, enthusiastic, supportive, a massive dork, a feminist, and a realistic optimist. My family is the most important thing in my life. I tend to be more logical than emotional on a personal level, but like any good writer, I also like to understand what makes people tick, what motivates their actions and choices—even my own. Growing up in Latin America, Catholicism was more of a culture than a religion, and while I don’t practice it much these days and disagree with the church’s positions on several key areas, I feel the teachings of Jesus are more or less the closest fit to my personal moral system, so I still identify as Catholic.

Panama is my home and I love it, but it’s not a very exciting place if you’ve lived there all your life. (If you’re a tourist, however, there’s plenty for you to do! You want to add it to your list of vacation destinations, believe me.) I’m lucky enough to have been able to travel to many incredible places as a tourist, and my educational journey has allowed me to live in several different locations around the world for significant periods of time, from the United States to Europe to Australia. As a consequence, I’ve been exposed to many different kinds of people from many different cultures and with many different ways of thinking, which suited my natural curiosity well.

That natural curiosity was cultivated in me since I was very young. Both of my parents are in STEM fields and since I was a child, I was taught to love science and to be proud of that drive to learn things. I am an unabashed nerd, a geek, a fangirl, and a proud one at that. It was that sense of earnest wonder that led me to complete a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in college, followed by a master’s degree in polymer science, both achievements of which I am very proud.

But most importantly, my love of science directly led me to a love of reading and writing since I was just a kid, and these disciplines have always been inextricably connected in my mind. I consider myself a scientist first and foremost, but I am also a writer at heart. It took going down a long road for me to understand that what I really wanted in life was to take my love of learning about science and apply it to the practice of writing—the two activities that truly fulfill me as an individual—but halfway through a doctoral candidacy in materials science I made the decision to change tracks entirely.

To that aim, I completed a second bachelor’s degree, this time in creative writing, capped with an Honors year in which I submitted a thesis titled “A Unified Theory of Science-based Fiction: Models for Commensurate Scientificity in Fictional Narratives.” I intend to move onto a doctoral degree in the same area, which I hope will enhance and be enhanced by my work as a science consultant. As I do this, I am also constantly writing fiction, with several novels in progress and even more ideas in development, which I hope to be able to publish someday soon. I am also very active in various fandoms, writing fanfiction, making videos, and engaging in discussion with fellow fans; you can get more of an idea of what I’m into at any moment through my socials or my vlog.