{"id":23938,"date":"2026-08-03T19:54:07","date_gmt":"2026-08-03T19:54:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/500queerscientists.com\/?p=23938"},"modified":"2026-08-04T00:01:24","modified_gmt":"2026-08-04T00:01:24","slug":"tomas-delgado-manea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/500queerscientists.com\/?p=23938","title":{"rendered":"Tom\u00e1s Delgado Manea"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I grew up the child of a Peruvian mother and Romanian father, moving between languages before I could firmly plant myself in either. Being first-generation American and low-income meant no one could show me how to thrive in academia, let alone how to become a scientist\u2014I built that map myself, one lab at a time, from translating for Spanish-speaking patients in a dermatology trial to running mediation models on PFAS exposure in pregnant people to training neural networks on whole-slide cancer images. Being Queer, transfemme\/non-binary, Latina\/\u00e9, ESL, and neurodivergent in STEM has meant constantly translating myself too\u2014gradually deciding, lab by lab, how to come forth as my authentic self. What&#039;s kept me in epidemiology and public health is that every dataset I&#039;ve touched, from chrome-plating sites near Black and Latin\u00e9 neighborhoods to multimodal endometrial cancer classifiers, has been about who is protected and who is studied nonchalantly. Pursuing an MD-PhD in epidemiology, I want to pioneer the medical literature on gender-diverse individuals (and other Queer individuals) through the perspective of a trans woman: not just measure it from outside. My story isn&#039;t separate from my science\u2014it&#039;s the mechanism through which I can spotlight my communities and their lives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I grew up the child of a Peruvian mother and Romanian father, moving between languages before I could firmly plant myself in either. Being first-generation American and low-income meant no one could show me how to thrive in academia, let alone how to become a scientist\u2014I built that map myself, one lab at a time,&#8230; <a class=\"view-article\" href=\"https:\/\/500queerscientists.com\/?p=23938\">View Article<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23940,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[159,106,127],"tags":[],"location":[7,327,6],"class_list":["post-23938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bioinformatics","category-epidemiology","category-public-health","location-california","location-los-angeles-california","location-united-states"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/500queerscientists.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/500queerscientists.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/500queerscientists.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/500queerscientists.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/500queerscientists.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/500queerscientists.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23938\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/500queerscientists.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/500queerscientists.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/500queerscientists.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23938"},{"taxonomy":"location","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/500queerscientists.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Flocation&post=23938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}