Carla is an MD-PhD candidate at Harvard Medical School. She completed her PhD in the laboratory of Zhigang He at Boston Children’s Hospital in June 2023, where she built a comprehensive anatomic and transcriptomic taxonomy of adult mouse spinal projecting neurons (SPNs). Carla’s efforts in characterizing SPNs, a major population of neurons affected by insults such as spinal cord injury and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, are motivated by her longstanding interest in neural injury and recovery. After completing her MD-PhD training, Carla aims to work as a physician-scientist toward developing better strategies for neural recovery following injury or disease. Carla was a 2017 Mitchell Scholar and studied Regenerative Medicine at the University of Galway. For her thesis, she conducted research with Abhay Pandit on the neuroinflammatory process following spinal cord injury. She obtained her undergraduate degree in Bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania. At Penn, she worked with D. Kacy Cullen to develop a tissue engineered treatment out of living cells to recreate the lost cytoarchitecture and signaling after neural injury.