Neuroscientist Christian Cazares grew up in a border town in California called Calexico. Many of his friends were American-born United States citizens with Mexican parents, so they traveled back and forth from school in Calexico to their homes across the border each day. Spanish was his first language. Financial and other opportunities were slim. Though no one in his family had gone to college, Cazares managed to land a full-ride scholarship to the University of California, Berkeley, where he took a somewhat torturous path into cognitive science. Today, he’s a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where he studies the brains of children with autism, EEG signaling, and brain organoids.
Cazares was able to find his way, but he was acutely aware that many others like him might not have the same luck. After the federal grant program that helped him figure out how to enroll in his Ph.D. program ran out of funding in 2014, he and some friends decided they could offer basically the same service themselves. They called their collaboration Colors of the Brain. That began more than a decade of effort by Cazares and some of his classmates to dismantle the class, race, and language-based barriers to participation in research careers in neuroscience.
I spoke to Cazares about why science is political, what it was like growing up in Calexico, why so few scientists write or deliver research talks in Spanish, and what’s wrong with the GRE as an entrance requirement for grad school in neuroscience.
What was your first exposure to science as a kid?
My very first formal memory of science was my chemistry class in sophomore year of high school, and that was because it wasn’t a great experience. I felt like nobody knew what was going on and nobody cared. It was just a formality for the school. If anything, I had a pretty big aversion to studying science early on because I never thought I was prepared to do it.
That really became clear when I went to Berkeley for my undergrad. I entered, ironically enough, as a chemistry major. I didn’t know what I was getting into at all. I put chemistry just to see what it was going to be like, and it ended up completely kicking my butt. I didn’t do well in those classes. It took some time to realize that maybe that path wasn’t for me.
I began to look for different majors, and by pure coincidence, I came to find cognitive science as a major. I’d never heard of it before, and to be honest, it looked really easy. I’d say that was one of my original motivations. I was like, “Oh, you take a bunch of psychology classes, there’s some linguistics here, there’s minimal math, there’s minimal physical sciences. You get to learn a little bit about the brain.” I knew almost nothing about the brain. That’s how it started. And then I was like, “Oh, the brain is pretty cool.”
What possessed you to enroll as a chemistry major when you had such a bad experience with that first chemistry class? Was there someone encouraging you to go into sciences, or did you have a role model that you were following?
It was really just like, “How can I get a job that makes money?” At the time I was thinking, chemists could always work for a company and get a stable job, and that was the extent of it. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I didn’t know anybody who had gone to college. I understood that you go to college to get a job afterward, and that’s about it. I entered Berkeley with a full-ride scholarship, so somebody noticed me. I wrote essays for the Gates Millennium Scholars Program. They asked you a lot about your experiences in school. Whoever gave me the scholarship was like, “This person is doing well in classes, but they can’t afford college, so how can we help them?”
What was it like growing up in Calexico?
Nothing ever happens. It’s a pretty quiet town. It’s a border town. You had some families that lived in Mexico, but their kids were American because they were born in the United States, so they were in the American education system. These kids would cross the border back and forth every morning and afternoon. My family lived on the American side, but I’d cross the border almost every weekend because I had friends on the Mexican side. It was such a casual thing that I didn’t really realize how unique that experience was until I left. It definitely felt like I needed to get out of there. It was fun to go to Mexico whenever I wanted, but at the same time, I didn’t feel like there was a future there after high school. And my perception of Calexico hasn’t changed. Every time I go back to visit my parents, I notice that instead of businesses opening, businesses are closing. Economically, it seems like I made the right decision.
In your Genomic Press interview you said you believe science is political. Can you tell me what that means to you?
It didn’t crystallize until I joined a research program aimed at underrepresented students. At the time, it was called Minority Access to Research Careers. It no longer exists, as you might imagine. That research program was really awesome because they were able to pay me part time while I was in a research lab at UC Berkeley. Through that program, I also participated in panels and workshops about grad school preparation and higher education preparation. I came to realize that what these programs do is fill a financial gap and a knowledge gap for individuals who might not have had that kind of information available to them in their upbringing, like first-generation college students, people from low-income backgrounds.
Then UC Berkeley has course requirements in the humanities, and through that, I came to learn more about the role of socioeconomic backgrounds in achieving success in higher education. I became very aware that it isn’t that people from underrepresented backgrounds don’t want to get Ph.D.s. It’s just that they don’t know how or they can’t afford to. I started thinking, “Well, why is this the case? Why are these gatekeeping mechanisms being reinforced by systems or policies at the federal or state level?” I realized, if the people doing the science dictate the science, and you don’t include people from certain backgrounds, then the science that’s relevant to them never gets done. As much as people might think science is an objective process that happens in a vacuum, it does not.
Read more: “How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math”
You co-founded Colors of the Brain in 2016. What did you most want to achieve with it?
My colleagues and I attended formal federal programs like the Minority Access to Research to learn how to apply to grad school and how to find a summer research position. We realized that having gone through the process, we had a lot to teach others. We didn’t need a formal, federally funded program just to tell people what to expect. Colors of the Brain started with that premise. There were five of us who started the program from the Cognitive Science Department and the neuroscience graduate research program. I got together with one of my friends from Calexico—who happened to be at UCSD—and we basically bought pizzas with our own money every time we wanted to hold one of these workshops. We just booked the room through the department. We would flyer on our own, email organizations on our own. Then we started mentorship pairs. By 2018, it became very clear that we weren’t going away. As we got older, people began to take us more seriously. Between 2020 and 2026, we became an actual summer research program and registered the organization as a 501c3.
You also founded Brain Borders in 2023. The mission there is more related to bilingual education. What was the inspiration behind that project?
My now wife and I were like, “What if we just went to my hometown and did neuroscience outreach?” We’d already done that as grad students, and we knew how easy it was to get materials either from our labs or the neuroscience outreach program at UC San Diego. So we planned to hold a two-hour session during the psychology class that my own high school teacher still teaches today. Since then, we’ve also gone to Southwest High School in El Centro, California, in Imperial Valley. We wanted people to understand what college is and what happens after college if you want to do neuroscience. It’s something that we wish we would’ve heard about. The difference between medical school and a doctorate program is something a lot of people don’t understand.
And you felt that offering bilingual sciences was important in this context, for people like you to be able to have access.
Spanish is my first language, and language is a systemic barrier to success just like socioeconomic position is. It’s a barrier that’s reinforced by certain systems. And English became the language of science not even that long ago, especially after World War II. I wondered why that was. There were many not so great reasons. You think about how that’s been reinforced over the last couple of decades to such an extent where you can have the second most spoken language in all of North America be one of the least represented at the highest levels of science in North America.
Even if you talk to people from Mexico, or South America, like Brazil, they’ll tell you, “I can speak Spanish as my first language, but I cannot give a talk about my research in Spanish or Portuguese.” You’re like, “But why?” And they’ll tell me, “I’ve never been put in a situation where I’ve had to do that.”
There are no incentives. Without incentives, why make the effort? Why teach it that way? Even the more technical concepts are taught in English and are never truly translated. There has to be a concerted effort to think about the best way to explain this concept in another language.
Do you write papers in Spanish or give talks on the research you do in Spanish?
Yes, that came about a year and a half ago, after I’d started doing outreach and got comfortable doing outreach in Spanish. Myself and a couple of other grad students and a professor named Alex Chaim got together and were like, “What if we do a seminar series where people at UCSD are challenged to give their talks in Spanish?”
It started very casually. Maybe like a dozen people would show up to see us struggle. The challenge really is: Can you go through the entire talk without saying something in English? Can you try to make your figures in Spanish? People recognized that this was a thing that was happening and that we had funding to cater food after the seminar. Eventually some medical students in Tijuana and California caught wind of it, and they started bringing people over.
What was the hardest part of communicating your research in Spanish?
Finding out how to say certain technical terms in a way that wasn’t super redundant. Sometimes scientific terms in English are a little bit snappier than in Spanish. It’s a three-word concept in Spanish as opposed to a one-word concept in English. You have to say the whole thing. As I was talking, I’d sometimes feel like, “I’m just boring people repeating myself.”
You also helped to get the GRE removed as a requirement for the neuroscience Ph.D. program at UCSD. How did this come about?
A lot of this momentum gathered during a time when a lot of Americans, and people with power in America, began to realize that racism is really bad. A lot of institutions began to put more attention to the concept of systemic racism. Between 2016 and 2020, there was a big push, at least within the neurosciences, to get rid of the GRE due to the overwhelming amount of evidence that it held no predictive power toward determining who would get a Ph.D. or how many papers somebody would publish in their Ph.D.
Thankfully, the people in the room making this decision about the UCSD neuroscience program were evidence believers. The other argument was that other major neuroscience programs at Stanford, Harvard, and Berkeley had already gotten rid of the requirements for similar reasons the year prior. I was like, “If we’re supposed to be one of the best neuroscience programs in the world, why are we falling behind our competition?”
But it’s been 10 years now, and since then there’s been something of a rebound effect. This is much more evident at the SAT level, where you’re getting a lot of opinion pieces, but not a lot of evidence-based writings, that try to counterbalance the progress that happened in that realm. A lot of times you look at who wrote these pieces, and they’re either working indirectly with a standardized testing company, or they’re in a for-profit sector of higher education, where you have direct incentive to promote this kind of testing. Unfortunately, it does convince some people that don’t read beyond the headline, when they see, “Oh, look, students are falling behind, or they’re coming unprepared to college, let’s bring back standardized testing.”
The point is, there was a lot of momentum and that did lead to successfully removing the GRE as a requirement for neuroscience programs, but I’m seeing a turnaround.
What one achievement are you most proud of?
The coolest thing was being able to publish commentary in Nature Neuroscience about Colors of the Brain—being able to have the platform that a journal like that provides. It was something that was peer-reviewed, as well. It went through two rounds of revisions.
I hope to actually get a paper in Nature Neuroscience someday through my science, but it was cool for a journal that often doesn’t talk about these things, to put into writing that, “Hey, like if you’re trying to do this kind of work, please don’t start from scratch. Here’s what we learned. Here are our materials on GitHub for free. Please reach out to us if you need anything cleared up.” The author list for that commentary had over a dozen people, which is just a sample of all the many graduate mentors and postdocs who made the research program a reality. 
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