A neuroscientist from the US-Mexico border is building the tools to bring brain research to communities like his own
The research question that drives Christian Cazares did not come from a journal article. It came from watching his nephew, who has autism spectrum disorder, travel hours from their hometown of Calexico, California, to reach the nearest specialists. Calexico sits on the US-Mexico border. More than 80% of Cazares's schoolmates qualified for the free lunch program. The burden of time, travel, and cost his family endured for basic services made something he had known abstractly suddenly concrete.
"The zip code you are born in determines outcomes," Cazares said in a new interview published in Brain Medicine by Genomic Press.
EEG as an equity instrument
That recognition led Cazares to the laboratory of Dr. Bradley Voytek at UC San Diego, whose work on extracting physiologically meaningful measures from scalp EEG offered something rare: a diagnostic method that is portable, affordable, and does not require proximity to a major medical center. For Cazares, EEG is simultaneously a scientific instrument and an equity tool.
His research now pursues three interconnected lines. He is establishing correspondence between patient EEG signals and cortical organoid activity, comparing recordings from children with autism to organoids derived from those same patients. He is identifying transcriptomic signatures linked to aberrant electrophysiology in a mouse model of Rett syndrome using single-nucleus RNA sequencing. And he is connecting cortical electrophysiology to innate and reflexive behaviors in patients with intellectual disabilities who cannot complete standard laboratory tasks.
"I envision a future in which a patient's EEG and clinical assessments guide high-throughput screening of personalized therapeutics in brain organoids derived from that patient," he said. The ultimate goal: biomarkers that can reach communities far from academic medical centers.
$230,000 raised before passing his qualifying exam
Cazares co-founded Colors of the Brain in 2016, as a first-year graduate student who had not yet passed his qualifying exam. The nonprofit has raised and managed over $230,000, supported five cohorts of scholars, and produced graduates now enrolled in doctoral programs and leading the organization themselves. The program offers the highest stipends among UCSD summer undergraduate research programs - a deliberate choice, because unpaid research opportunities favor students who can afford to work for free.
Around the same period, Cazares served as student chair of his graduate program's executive committee and argued for removing the GRE from UCSD graduate admissions. He presented research showing the test's inability to predict student outcomes and its documented harm to low-income applicants. The committee agreed. The year was 2018, before the broader movement to drop the GRE had gained national momentum.
Science in Spanish
Language, Cazares argues, is inseparable from class in science. Roughly 80% of journals are published in English, and scientific journalism worldwide depends on English-only sources. He founded BrainBorders to provide bilingual neuroscience education in Calexico and nearby cities, organized a Spanish-language workshop at the 2025 Society for Neuroscience meeting, and is preparing a workshop conducted entirely in Spanish at CETYS, a university in Tijuana.
"I realized I couldn't even present my own research in Spanish, and I started asking myself why," he said.
His three-word philosophy - science is political - is not a provocation. It is a description of what happens when zip codes determine who gets diagnosed, who gets funded, and who gets to do the work. Cazares is not waiting for the system to fix itself. He is building alternatives from the inside, one portable EEG at a time.