Playing sports was his top priority in high school, but encouragement from one of his teachers led him pursue a major in mathematics in college. As an undergraduate, Hernandez’s interest in population genetics sprung from his curiosity about how and why his grandmother developed diabetes. He wanted to try to design a model to show the interaction between blood glucose, insulin and insulin receptors that leads to the onset of diabetes. Hernandez went on to earn his PhD in Biometry from Cornell University. The Hernandez lab at UCSF uses data from human genomes to study patterns of genetic variation between populations. This video is one of three in the Career Spotlight: Biotechnology series. Explore: Biology, Education, biotechnology, career, genetics. diabetes