Christian Cazares, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego, where he works under the mentorship of Dr. Bradley Voytek, himself a first-generation college student whose trajectory mirrors the socioeconomic obstacles Cazares has spent his career dismantling. Born in Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico, Cazares grew up in Calexico, California, a US-Mexico border town where over 80% of students qualified for the free lunch program. The NIH MARC Award at UC Berkeley opened the door to his first research experience, and the NIH Postbaccalaureate Program at the University of Pennsylvania deepened his commitment to neuroscience through intracranial EEG work in Dr. Brian Litt's epilepsy lab. Doctoral training with Dr. Christina Gremel at UCSD expanded his expertise across human and animal recordings, but the defining pivot came through his nephew with autism spectrum disorder, whose family in Calexico endured hours of travel simply to access basic diagnostic services, making vivid how profoundly the zip code of one's birth still determines health outcomes. That experience led Cazares to a research program centered on cross-scale electrophysiological biomarkers bridging patient findings to experimental models in neurodevelopmental disorders, positioning aperiodic neural measures as a translational anchor tethered to portable, affordable, clinically accessible methodology across three directions: within-subject correspondence between scalp EEG and cortical organoids in children with autism; transcriptomic signatures of aberrant electrophysiology in a Rett syndrome mouse model via single-nucleus RNA sequencing; and linking cortical electrophysiology to reflexive behaviors translatable to patients with intellectual disabilities. As a first-year graduate student in 2016, Cazares co-founded Colors of the Brain, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit providing paid research positions for students from marginalized backgrounds across five scholar cohorts, with lessons published in Nature Neuroscience (Cazares C & Patino M et al., 2024;27(11):2047-2052. doi: 10.1038/s41593-024-01790-5, PMC12020381) and new leadership recently awarded a grant from the International Brain Research Organization. He also founded BrainBorders for bilingual neuroscience outreach in border communities, organized a Spanish-language workshop at the Society for Neuroscience in 2025, and successfully advocated for GRE removal from graduate admissions at UCSD in 2018. In this Genomic Press Interview, Cazares reflects on how class, language, and geography shaped his science and his sense of purpose, and on why, for him, science is political.