Episode 7: Aurora Alvarez-Buylla

“Science is awesome, but life comes first.”

Aurora Alvarez-Buylla is a fourth year graduate student in the Laboratory of Organismal Biology at Stanford University, studying how poison frogs take up toxins from their diet to become toxic themselves. In this episode, we talk with Aurora about how she transitioned from wanting to be an astronomer as a kid, to doing computer science in college at MIT, to eventually finding her way to pursuing a biology PhD at Stanford. We talk about how to figure out the difference between not liking something because you aren’t good at it and not liking something because you truly don’t enjoy it. Aurora is really passionate about using community building in order to make all students in her department feel welcomed and included, and in this episode she shares some of her unique insights into identity, inclusion, and diversity.

Mentioned in the episode:

• Aurora is an HHMI Gilliam Fellow! Find out more about that here.

Get in touch with Aurora:

• Twitter

Get in touch with Steph:

• Instagram
• Twitter

Get in touch with the podcast:

• Email: rootstostempodcast@gmail.com
• Website: rootstostempodcast.com

Listen and subscribe:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify