Carlos R. Ponce

“My life here is a permanent debt that can only be settled by working for a more perfect union, by voting and paying taxes and helping people gain jobs by building new technologies,” neuroscientist Carlos Ponce recently wrote in a Reuters commentary.  Ponce, who came to the U.S. from Mexico as a child, is an assistant professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Washington University School of Medicine and earned his M.D and a Ph.D. from Harvard Medical School. His research aims to define how different brain regions interact to solve motion processing and visual object recognition. Ponce says his childhood also was “altered by a fateful night running across the border, surrounded by strangers, the amber lights of Tijuana giving way to darkness and sand hills and the unknown. But in my run, there was hope. There was the unfailing belief that the United States was a force for good, a place that rewarded hard work and ultimately invited it from immigrants.” Updated July 2018