Multiplying Possibilities

Growing up as the only child of a single mother in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Cordova always displayed a love for learning and a desire to figure things out. “My mom was very involved when I was younger, so I remember reading and solving puzzles at a young age,” she said. “But it was going to ‘school’ for the first time that really started me on a lifelong path of learning. Head Start cemented my love of learning.”

Like many young girls, however, it took Cordova awhile to discover her aptitude for science. “When I was elementary age, I didn’t think I was very good at science because we did it so infrequently,” she explained. “Then in seventh grade, I took the general science class and completely fell in love with it. It was like all of the best parts of math and storytelling combined.”

That passion led Cordova to take upper-level classes while in high school, including pre-calculus as a sophomore. “After two months in that class with juniors and seniors, I was blowing the curve,” she remembered, adding that her math teacher soon suggested a career as an engineer. “I went home and asked my mom, ‘Why would my math teacher want me to work on trains?’”

Yet that suggestion led Cordova to set her sights on studying chemical engineering and law. “I wanted to do patent law so I could manage my own inventions,” she explained.

Finding an Academic Home

As part of the third cohort of the prestigious Gates Millennium Scholars program, Cordova received an all-inclusive college scholarship. After initially enrolling in the Illinois Institute of Technology, Cordova transferred as a freshman to NMSU. “I went to New Mexico State because I wanted to go west, I wanted to go somewhere warm, and I wanted to go somewhere where I had connections,” she said, noting that her family’s New Mexico roots go back to the 1620s and she also had ties to NMSU faculty member and author Denise Chavez through her hometown library.

Changing universities wasn’t Cordova’s only shift—she also changed majors, thanks to a biochemistry class taught by Dr. Carol Potenza. “I ended up doing the same thing as I did in my high school math course and blew the curve,” Cordova said. “Dr. Potenza said I should consider becoming a scientist.”

Cordova quickly found her home in NMSU’s Biochemistry Department. “I love that biochemistry takes all of the theoreticals of chemistry and shows how these seemingly random events can make the most beautiful and elegant organisms and processes happen,” she said.

The William Conroy Honors College also played an important part in her undergraduate education, as did numerous research experiences. She worked in two labs through the Minority Biomedical Research Support (MBRS) Research Initiative for Scientific Enhancement (RISE) program and analyzed institutional data on diversity and student trends in a work-study program.

Creating a Career

After graduating in 2009, Cordova was selected for a one-year internship at the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. She did clinical research on breast cancer and worked on policy issues. As a result, she published a paper about Hispanic mothers’ attitudes towards vaccinating their teenage daughters.

Crossing to the East Coast, Cordova enrolled in Johns Hopkins University to earn a master’s degree in human genetics and molecular biology. She then joined Georgetown University, where she worked on an initiative to increase the number of minority students in medical school, before moving to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where her focus was on science education.

A chance encounter at a nail salon with Carole Silver, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law’s professor of global law and practice, led Cordova to enroll in the university’s Master of Science in Law program. “The MSL is a one-of-a-kind master’s program in the law school that is exclusive to STEM professionals who have an interest in the law,” the Aggie said. “It gives training in the relevant areas of the law, like patents, regulatory affairs, contracts, negotiations and all of those things that scientists might have to do or where scientists can bridge the gap between lawyers and scientists.”

After completing the one-year program, she returned to Washington, D.C., got married, and joined AccessLex Institute, a non-profit dedicated to increasing access to, affordability of, and diversity of law schools.

Yet her former Georgetown boss soon lured Cordova to join the Council for Advancement and Support of Education’s Opportunity and Inclusion Center in May. As senior manager of minority-serving institutions and indigenous communities, Cordova assists institutions with learning about best practices in alumni relations, development, and marketing/communications.