
Warm people, good tacos — and a light show
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.

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 The Saga, 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 Jason Liu 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.
Submit an abstract
Discover BMB, the annual meeting of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, will be held March 23–26 in San Antonio. Abstracts for poster presentations and spotlight talks will be accepted through Nov. 30. See the poster categories and spotlight talk themes.
Enjoy reading ASBMB Today?
Become a member to receive the print edition four times a year and the digital edition monthly.
Learn moreGet the latest from ASBMB Today
Enter your email address, and we’ll send you a weekly email with recent articles, interviews and more.
Latest in People
People highlights or most popular articles

Cedeño–Rosario and Kaweesa win research award
The award honors outstanding early-career scientists studying cancer, infectious disease and basic science.

ASBMB names 2026 award winners
Check out their lectures at the annual meeting in March in the Washington, D.C., metro area.

Peer through a window to the future of science
Aaron Hoskins of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Sandra Gabelli of Merck, co-chairs of the 2026 ASBMB annual meeting, to be held March 7–10, explain how this gathering will inspire new ideas and drive progress in molecular life sciences.

Castiglione and Ingolia win Keck Foundation grants
They will receive at least $1 million of funding to study the biological mechanisms that underly birds' longevity and sequence–function relationships of intrinsically disordered proteins.

How undergrad research catalyzes scientific careers
Undergraduate research doesn’t just teach lab skills, it transforms scientists. For Antonio Rivera and Julissa Cruz–Bautista, joining a lab became a turning point, fostering critical thinking, persistence and research identity.

Simcox and Gisriel receive mentoring award
They were honored for contributing their time, knowledge, energy and enthusiasm to mentoring postdocs in their labs.