Meet Danelly Rodríguez
Danelly Rodríguez is a first-generation university student taking the road less traveled from growing up in a disadvantaged neighborhood in Queens to a doctorate in epidemiology. She’s a firm believer in following your passion: “There are obstacles that evidently stop us minorities from succeeding. You have choices, but you may need to work a bit harder as you break barriers around you. If I can, you can.”
What was your path to higher education?
Higher education was not a priority in my household, so my education and desire for a professional career were mainly self-driven. At first, I wanted to find a job where I could make the most money and help my parents pay bills, which led me to start taking business classes in college. Still, I quickly realized I needed to be more passionate about the field. Still deciding what I foresaw myself doing, I took an Introduction to Neuroscience course, where I became intrigued by how the brain works and how brain diseases manifest. It was then that I found my passion for science.
What led you to the laboratory?
I applied and was accepted into a prestigious NIH-funded scholarship program at Hunter College designed to help underrepresented students get research experience. I got a full ride to finish my undergraduate degree and began doing basic laboratory research. Everything in the lab was very controlled; I kept asking myself, “How do things work in an actual population?”
I then worked for a couple of years on a randomized clinical trial where I got the opportunity to contribute to an important project validating a novel cognitive screening assessment designed specifically for utility in a low-income neighborhood that was predominantly Hispanic/Latino and Black. I was primarily responsible for recruiting patients and administering the cognitive screener, and just by my own observation, I noticed how often dementia went undiagnosed in my community.
I developed a project with my research group where we assessed usual cognitive screener questions that have been validated in white populations. We found these “validated” questions did not capture cognitive impairment in Blacks and Hispanics/Latinos. I realized the only way we could build a better screener tool was to study the disease in this population and their risk factors. That was my “aha” moment. I googled what kind of field could lead me to that research. Epidemiology came up, and the rest was history.
What kind of research are you doing in your doctoral program?
I’m working with [Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Environmental Health] Kasia Kordas, researching environmental factors and cognitive health in children. We’re looking at the mixture of arsenic and pesticides—because these are very prevalent in minority Hispanic populations—and how they affect executive function in children. We know so much about lead but not about these other pollutants in urban environments that experience different routes of exposure compared to rural populations. For example, urban populations, especially those from low-income neighborhoods, tend to use pesticides in their homes. Still, we don’t know about the effects.