Naiara Doherty Garcia

Naiara, or Nai (as most people call her), is currently a second year graduate student in the Kane Lab in the Ecology & Evolutionary Biology (EBIO) Department. She is studying plants in the context of Space Travel, and is working as Assistant Research Scientist II at Space Lab Technologies, LLC. 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 Boulder 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 Boulder, 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 a poster award and an honorable mention. Recently, Nai was awarded the NIH/CU Molecular Biophysics Training grant for the academic year '22-23 & '23-24. Nai also received an award during the CSU Hydrology Days Student Flash talks competition. 

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, elementary school, and has pledged to keep on volunteering. She is currently volunteering with other CU teams like STEM Routes and Science Under the Dome. In the past she was the secretary of Boulder County Tutors, a non-profit organization that served pre-college students affected by the Marshall fire 2021. In her spare time, she loves to do gardening, reading a good book, gaming, hiking with her husband, watching movies and playing with her two lovable cats.