Tomás Delgado Manea
They/She/Elles/Ella
I am queer, trans, and non-binary and I am an epidemiologist/biostatistician.//
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—I 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/é, ESL, and neurodivergent in STEM has meant constantly translating myself too—gradually deciding, lab by lab, how to come forth as my authentic self. What's kept me in epidemiology and public health is that every dataset I've touched, from chrome-plating sites near Black and Latiné 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't separate from my science—it's the mechanism through which I can spotlight my communities and their lives.
LinkedIn @tdmanea