Norma Iris Rodriguez Malave

Norma is a Ph.D. candidate in the Cellular and Molecular Pathology Program at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). She has a B.S. in Industrial Biotechnology from the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez (UPRM) where she was a MARC scholar, and had the opportunity to attend ABRCMS, a national minority research conference. Additionally, she carried out graduate studies in Molecular Population Genetics in the Oleksyk-Cruzado Lab at UPRM.

Her current research at the Rao Lab focuses on understanding the role of non-coding RNAs in human pre-B cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia. For this, she is using a combination of cell line models, lentiviral expression systems, mouse models, and analysis of primary human tumor samples. She hopes to work as an independent investigator in cancer research, and to become an educator in the future.