Neuroscientist from US-Mexico border dismantles science’s class problem from the inside

(Press-News.org) LA JOLLA, California, USA, 17 March 2026 — A first-generation college student who once needed research stipends to pay rent has spent the last decade building the infrastructure to ensure others do not face the same calculus. Dr. Christian Cazares, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego, grew up in Calexico, California, a border town where more than eighty percent of his schoolmates qualified for the free lunch program. In a new interview published today in the Genomic Press journal Brain Medicine, Dr. Cazares speaks with unusual candor about the financial, linguistic, and geographic barriers that shaped his trajectory, and about what he has done, systematically, to dismantle them.

A Zip Code That Determines Outcomes

The defining pivot in Dr. Cazares’ research came not from a laboratory result but from a family visit. His nephew, who has autism spectrum disorder and lives in Calexico, was hours away from the nearest specialists. The burden of time, travel, and cost that his family endured to access healthcare services made something abstract suddenly steer his research vision.

“The burdens of time, travel, and cost that my family endured just to access basic services made clear to me how much the zip code you are born in determines outcomes,” Dr. Cazares said.

That recognition led him to the laboratory of Dr. Bradley Voytek, whose work on extracting physiologically meaningful measures from scalp EEG offered something rare: a method that is portable, affordable, and does not require proximity to a major medical center. The choice was both scientific and moral. EEG is the instrument; equity is the ambition.

Biomarkers Built to Travel

Dr. Cazares is now pursuing three interconnected research directions. He is establishing correspondence between patient EEG and cortical organoid activity, comparing signals from children with autism to organoids derived from those same patients. He is also identifying transcriptomic signatures associated with aberrant electrophysiological signals in a mouse model of Rett syndrome through single-nucleus RNA sequencing. A third line of inquiry links cortical electrophysiology to innate and reflexive behaviors in patients with intellectual disabilities who cannot complete complex 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. “Most importantly, because EEG is non-invasive, portable, and inexpensive, I hope these biomarkers can someday reach underserved communities far from major medical centers, reducing the disparities that delayed my own nephew’s diagnosis.”

Removing the Gatekeepers

Dr. Cazares co-founded Colors of the Brain in 2016 as a first-year graduate student, alongside three colleagues, before he had even passed his qualifying examination. The nonprofit has raised and managed over two hundred thirty thousand dollars, 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, because unpaid research experiences favor students who can afford to work for free.

Around the same period, Dr. Cazares served as student chair of his graduate program’s executive committee and advocated for the removal of the GRE requirement from graduate admissions at UCSD, presenting research on 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.

“One financial barrier that I think should continue to be scrutinized is the use of standardized tests like the GRE as gatekeepers to higher education,” he said.

Language as the Last Wall

Language, Dr. Cazares argues, is inseparable from class when science is concerned. Around eighty percent of journals are published in English, and scientific journalism worldwide depends heavily on English-only sources. He founded BrainBorders to provide bilingual neuroscience education in Calexico and nearby cities. He organized a Spanish-language workshop at the Society for Neuroscience in 2025, and he is preparing a workshop conducted entirely in Spanish on his postdoctoral laboratory’s analytical tools at CETYS, a university in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico.

“I realized I couldn’t even present my own research in Spanish, and I started asking myself why,” he said.

His philosophy is spare and unambiguous. Asked for the aphorism that best encapsulates his life, he offered three words: science is political. For Dr. Cazares, that is not a provocation. It is a description of what science has always been, and what it can, with effort, become otherwise.

Dr. Christian Cazares’s Genomic Press interview is part of a larger series called Innovators and Ideas that highlights the people behind today’s most influential scientific breakthroughs. Each interview in the series offers a blend of cutting-edge research and personal reflections, providing readers with a comprehensive view of the scientists shaping the future. By combining a focus on professional achievements with personal insights, this interview style invites a richer narrative that both engages and educates readers. This format provides an ideal starting point for profiles that explore the scientist’s impact on the field, while also touching on broader human themes. More information on the research leaders and rising stars featured in our Innovators and Ideas – Genomic Press Interview series can be found on our interview website: https://interviews.genomicpress.com/.

The Genomic Press Interview in Brain Medicine titled “Christian Cazares: Confronting science’s class problem,” is freely available via Open Access, starting on 17 March 2026 in Brain Medicine at the following hyperlink: https://doi.org/10.61373/bm026k.0021.

About Brain Medicine: Brain Medicine (ISSN: 2997-2639, online and 2997-2647, print) is a peer-reviewed medical research journal published by Genomic Press, New York. Brain Medicine is a new home for the cross-disciplinary pathway from innovation in fundamental neuroscience to translational initiatives in brain medicine. The journal’s scope includes the underlying science, causes, outcomes, treatments, and societal impact of brain disorders, across all clinical disciplines and their interface.

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