 What do you do at the Museum?
As the collections assistant I process and catalogue photographs of type specimens, assist in maintenance of the Museum's extensive plant collection and process incoming and outgoing herbarium loans, accessions and exchanges.
How did you become interested in your field?
When I was 12, my family moved from Michoacan to the San Joaquin Valley in California, where my dad was an agricultural worker. I enjoyed being surrounded by fields of watermelons, tomatoes, beans, and corn, as well as plantations of pecans, apricots, and almonds.
I also enjoyed fishing on the weekends and playing with the farm animals. These surroundings and the influence of a good biology teacher at my high school made me interested in biology. When I was 17, we moved back to Mexico, where I went to college and studied biology.
What do you love about what you do?
I love being in the fresh air and studying living things in their natural environment. In Michoacan, where I did my undergraduate thesis, while collecting plants and climbing the mountains, I enjoyed seeing the different plant communities that changed with the altitude, from oak-pine to fir forest. Later, on Barro Colorado Island, Panama, where I did my master’s thesis, I experienced the grandeur of the tropical rain forest for the first time.
Has being a woman made a difference in your career?
You have to be very competitive--being a biologist is hard. At the same time, you also want to be at home, being a mother. It's not a career where you go to your office and then you leave at 4:30 and go home. If you want to be in the field you have to decide which is more important and at which point you have to dedicate more time to your family
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I would like to work in the tropics. I like taxonomy, the description of species, but I really like ecology, the interaction of species. I would like to be experienced in both of these areas of biology to be able to help in conservation. You have to know a lot about a species in order to protect it.