She was born in Venezuela, where she studied biology at the Central University of Venezuela, and received her PhD degree from the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research. She joined Roger Craig’s laboratory at University of Massachusetts Medical School in 2001 for her doctoral thesis and first postdoctoral position. Between 2007 and 2016, she was a senior postdoctoral associate in Guillermo Altenberg’s laboratory at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. Her main research interest is to understand the function of proteins, especially membrane proteins, from a biochemical and structural perspective.