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Naiara, or Nai (as most people call her), is currently a third year graduate student in the Niswander Lab in the Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology (MCDB) Department. She graduated from Winona State University in 2017 with a B.Sc. in Cell and Molecular Biology. She moved to the USA in 2014 from Brazil, where she was born, and moved to Â鶹ӰԺ in 2018, where she has been working for CU since. In 2020, Naiara volunteered to run Covid-19 tests at the Wardenburg Student Health Center at CU Â鶹ӰԺ, where she later on became the lead technologist for Covid-19 RT-PCR tests. As an undergraduate student she interned at the Mayo Clinic and participated in the 2016 Experimental Biology conference where she won an award and an honorable mention. Recently, Nai was awarded the NIH/CU Molecular Biophysics Training grant for the academic year '22-23 and '23-24.

Outside of lab work, Naiara has a passion for teaching, recently discovered as being a teaching assistant during her first graduate year! She has been involved with volunteering since an early age and has pledged to keep on volunteering throughout her time at CU. She is currently involved with other CU teams like S.C.O.P.E., and Science Under the Dome. In the past she was the secretary of Â鶹ӰԺ County Tutors, a non-profit organization that served pre-college students affected by the Marshall fire that happened in December 2021. In her spare time, she loves to do gardening, read a good book, gaming, hiking with her husband, watching movies and playing with her two adorable cats.