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On a school break in late December a few years ago, I took a 10-day solo road trip around Texas’s big cities, spending a day or two in each place — that’s when I fell in love with San Antonio. I ended up moving to the U.S. from Brazil, and San Antonio has been my home for the past two years.

Leticia Rodrigues visits the Japanese Tea Garden in San Antonio.

San Antonio is filled with warm people — the sun, for sure, has an influence on that — and is a big city with small-town vibes. One of the good surprises of the city — besides the good tacos — is , a video light display shown six nights a week at the main plaza that tells the city’s history in a nice graphic and artistic way.

Here, too, I found my passion for cancer biology. I majored in biotechnology for my undergraduate degree and postbaccalaureate in Brazil, and since then I’ve gained experience in a variety of scientific areas, In Brazil I worked in three labs, studying bee brain development, phytopharmacos and vaccine development. In the U.S., I’ve worked on cardiovascular diseases and cancer.

Since moving to San Antonio, I have worked as a research assistant with at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, where we aim to decipher the role of intrinsically disordered regions, or IDRs, which are often found in transcription proteins and are known by their ability to phase separate.

In the lab, we are working to understand how multivalent interactions between IDRs mediate the enhancer assembly during normal hormone signaling or when containing a pathogenic mutation. We have focused on the androgen receptor and estrogen receptor alpha, which are known to influence the development and growth of many human cancers.