I was born on May 28, 1973, in Lima, Peru. I lived in Guayaquil, Ecuador, the first years of my life until the Peru-Ecuador war of 1980. After drifting for some time, we settled in Peru. After a High School education at Newton College, where I received the IB-Diploma (International Baccalaureate Organization), I enrolled at a prep-academy in order to get into the Universidad Agraria-La Molina. Due to inadequate conditions, I could not pursue my higher education studies in Peru. I applied and was accepted at Purdue University, where I started my undergraduate education the Fall of 1991. By the end of the Spring semester of 1995 I was awarded the degree of Bachelors of Science from the department of Agronomy, where I studied Plant Genetics and Plant Breeding under the supervision of Dr. Mackenzie. During my tenure at Purdue, I worked at the International Potato Center (Summer of 1992) in Lima, Peru; in Dr. Bennetzen's laboratory (Summer of 1993), at Purdue; and at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (Summer of 1994) in Cali, Colombia. During the Summer of 1995, after I applied and was accepted to pursue my graduate education at Michigan State University, I worked at a the National Agriculture Research Center in Tsukuba, Japan, under the supervision of Dr. Kitamura. As a graduate student in the department of Genetics at Michigan State University I worked in Dr. Raikhel's laboratory studying plant cell wall metabolism, one of the projects pursued at the MSU-DOE-Plant Research Laboratory. During my Ph.D. I had the opportunity work with Dr. Palme in Cologne, Germany; Dr. Orellana in Santiago, Chile; and Dr. Bacic in Melbourne, Australia. In December 2001 I graduated with a Ph.D. in Genetics and moved to Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) in Houston, Texas, where I pursued my first post-doctorate studying muscle differentiation and cell cycle control in Dr. Zhang's laboratory. During my post-doctorate I had the opportunity to work part-time for Alfred Lasher, president of Picoscript. Despite a productive and enjoyable experience at the department of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics, I decided to expand my horizons and joined SeqWright in August of 2003, where I worked as Quality Assurance (QA) Manager and Scientific Advisor. After a year I resigned and went back to BCM to work on the molecular genetics and epigenetics of Rett Syndrome at Dr. Van den Veyver's laboratory. Two years after my first experience in industry, I joined Identigene as their Senior Scientist to create a mouse genotyping business from scratch. In addition, as their QA/QC Manager I made sure that all AABB and ISO/IEC 17025:2005 requirements were satisfied. While working at Identigene I earned an MBA (March 2006) from Capella University and ran my first marathon (June) in San Diego, California (Rock 'n Roll). After 5 years in Houston I was recruited by Lancaster Laboratories and relocated to Pennsylvania to establish a cell and molecular biology testing service in support of drug manufacturing (GMP). After designing and validating a comprehensive collection of residual DNA qPCR assays, in September 2008 Helixis, Inc. gave me the opportunity to join their cross-functional team to develop instrumentation and support tools for the life sciences. As a result I relocated to Carlsbad, California, and the experience has been one of the best in my life. After a year at Helixis I decided to resign my position there in order to focus full-time on running Mouse Genotype, the first company I started back in 2006. Currently I am President and CEO at Mouse Genotype and loving every aspect of it.