Dr. Flores-Ramirez is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at The Scripps Research Institute.

 

He grew up in Mexico and moved to California when he was 14 years old. 

 

"While I was an excellent high school student, a higher education seemed out of reach, especially considering my low socioeconomic status background. After becoming the first person in my family to finish high school, I enrolled into San Bernardino Valley College (SBVC) and later transferred to California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB) given that I was undocumented at the time, and they offered the most affordable matriculation. At CSUSB, the very first course I took was Psychobiology, which happened to be taught by a Mexican American professor, who was perhaps the first scientist of Mexican descent I had ever met in my entire life. While my interest in neuroscience grew because of that class, I believe the greatest impact it had was that being taught by a person who shared an almost identical life story as mine influenced me to believe I, too, could be a scientist. In 2016, I joined the doctoral program in Psychology at the University of Texas at El Paso, which I finished in the Spring of 2020. I joined the Martin-Fardon laboratory at Scripps later that year in order to continue to develop and refine my research skills in hopes of one day becoming a mentor and a role model so that I, like many of the mentors I have encountered in my life, can facilitate students’ pathways to science, especially those with complex social, economic, and academic challenges as the ones I overcame.”

 

He is very passionate about his education from the Minority Serving Institutions.  “Now at Scripps, the fact that I can compete with other postdoctoral fellows who come from universities with greater prestige and endowments speaks very highly of the quality of teaching and training offered in the institutions I attended.”

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His hobbies include anime, video games, reading, and journaling.